90 
LETTER VI. 
INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 
INDIRECT INJURIES — continued. 
Havine endeavoured to give you some idea of the mode in which 
insects establish and maintain their empire over man and his train of de- 
pendent animals, I shall next call your attention to his living vegetable pos- 
sessions, whether the produce of the forest, the field, or the garden; 
whether necessary to him for his support, convenient for his use, or mi- 
nistering to his comfort, pleasure, and delight: —and here you will find 
these little creatures as busily engaged in the work of mischief as ever, 
destroying what is necessary, deranging what is convenient, marring what 
is beautiful, and turning what should give us pleasure into an object of 
disgust. 
— Let us begin with the produce of our fields. — Bread is called “the staff 
of life: yet should Divine Providence in anger be pleased to give the 
rein to the various insects which, in the different stages of its growth, 
attack the plant producing it, how quickly would this staff be broken! 
From the moment that wheat begins to emerge from the soil, to the time 
when it is carried into the barn, it is exposed to their ravages. One of its 
earliest assailants in this country is that of which Mr. Walford has given 
an account in the Linnean Transactions, taking it for the wire-worm ; but, 
as Mr. Marsham observed, not correctly, it being probably the larva of 
' some coleopterous insect, perhaps of one of the numerous tribe of Bra- 
chyptera or rove-beetles, which are not universally carnivorous. This 
animal was discovered to infest the wheat in its earliest stage of growth 
after vegetation had commenced ; and there was reason to believe that it 
began even with the grain itself. It eats into the young plant about an 
inch below the surface, devouring the central part ; and thus, vegetation 
being stopped, it dies. Out of fifty acres sown with this grain in 1802, 
ten had been destroyed by the grub in question so early as October.t — 
Other predaceous Coleoptera will also attack young corn. This.is done by 
the larva of Zabrus gibbus, both with respect to wheat and barley. In the 
spring of 1813 not less than twelve German hides (Hufen), equal to two 
hundred and thirty English acres, of wheat, were destroyed by it in the 
canton of Seeburg, near Halle, in Germany; and Germar (who, with 
other members of the Society of Natural History at that place, ascertained 
the fact) suspects that it was the same insect described by Cooti, an 
Italian author, which caused great destruction in Upper Italy in 1776. 
Not only is the larva, which probably lives in that state three years, thus 
injurious, but, what one would not have expected, the perfect beetle itself 
attacks the grain, both of wheat and barley, when in the ear, clambering 
1 Linn. Trans. ix. 156—161. 
