324 DIRECT BENEFITS DERIVED FROM INSECTS. 



larvae of the common clothes-moth, which retain the colour 

 of the wool they have eaten unimpaired in its lustre, and 

 mix very well with water. To get a fine red, yellow, blue, 

 green, or any other colour or shade of colour, we should 

 merely have to feed our larvae with cloth of that tint a . 



Wax, so valuable for many minor purposes, and deem- 

 ed with us so indispensable to the comfort of the great, 

 is of still more importance in those parts of Europe and 

 America in which it forms a considerable branch of trade 

 and manufacture, as an article of extensive use in the re- 

 ligious ceremonies of the inhabitants. Humboldt informs 

 us, that not fewer than 25,000 arrobas, value upwards 

 of 83,000/., are annually exported from Cuba to New 

 Spain, where the quantity consumed in the festivals of 

 the Church is immense even in the smallest villages : 

 and that the total export of the same island in 1803 was 

 not less than 42,670 arrobas, worth upwards of 130,000/. b 

 Nearly the whole of the wax employed in Europe, and 

 by far the greater part of that consumed in America, is 

 the produce of the common hive-bee ; but in the latter 

 quarter of the globe a quantity by no means trifling is 

 obtained from various wild species. According to Don 

 F. de Azara, the inhabitants of Santiago del Estero ga- 

 ther every year not less than 14,000 pounds of a whitish 

 wax from the trees of Chaco c . 



In China wax is also produced by another insect, 

 which from the description of it by the Abbe Grosier 

 seems to be a species of Coccus. With this insect the 

 Chinese stock the two kinds of tree (Kan-la-chu and 



:| Reaum. iii. 95. *> Political Essay, iii. 62. 



'' Voyage dam VAmer. Merid. i. 162. 



