INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 97 
some parts of France, that people had been poisoned by eating worm- 
eaten peas, and they were forbidden by authority to be exposed for sale 
in the market; but the fears of the public were soon removed by the ex- 
amination of some scientific men, who found the cause of the injury to be 
the insect of which I am now speaking.! Another species of Bruchus 
(B. pectinicornis) deyours the peas in China and Barbary. A leguminous 
seed, much used when boiled as food for horses in India, known to Euro- 
peans by the name of Gram, but in the Tamul dialect called Koloo, and by 
the Moors Cooltee, is the appropriate food of a fourth kind of Bruchus, 
related to the last, but having the antenna, which in the male are pec- 
tinated, much shorter than the body. It is, perhaps, 2. scutellaris. A 
parcel of this seed? given me by Captain Green was full of this insect, 
several grains containing two. Indeed, in tropical climates, the seeds of 
almost every pod-bearing plant, as of the genera Gleditschia, Theobroma, 
Mimosa, Robinia, &c. are eaten by some species of Bruchus, as are the 
cocoa-nut and palm-nut.* Molina, in his History of Chili, tells us of a 
beetle, which he names Lucanus pilmus, that infests the beans in that 
country ;—a circumstance quite at variance with the habits of the Lu- 
canid@, which all prey upon timber, This insect was probably a Phaleria, 
in'which genus the mandibles are protruded from the head, like those of 
Lucanus ; and one species, as we have seen above, feeds upon maize. 
Great profits are sometimes derived by farmers from their crops of 
clover-seed: but this does not happen very often; for a small weevil 
(Apion flavifemoratum), which abounds everywhere at almost all times of 
the year, feeds upon the seed of the purple clover, and in most seasons 
does the crop considerable damage ; so that a plant of the fairest appear- 
ance will, in consequence of the voracity of this little enemy, produce 
scarcely any thing. Another species (Apion flavipes) infests the Dutch or 
white clover. ‘The young plants of purple clover, when just sprung, are 
often, as Mr. Joseph Stickney pointed out to me, much injured by the 
same little jumping beetles (Hadtica) that attack the turnips. In Germany, —- 
where Rape is more extensively grown than with us for the seed, the crop 
sometimes wholly fails from the attacks of a small grub, supposed to be 
that of a weevil of the genera Nedyus or Ceutorhynchus, which, piercing the 
stalks from the base to the summit, deprives the blossom of the due supply 
of sap, and thus causes it to perish.® 
But not only, if let loose to the work of destruction, might insects an- 
nihilate our grain and pulse, they would also deprive the earth of that 
beautiful green carpet which now covers it, and is so agreeable and so re 
freshing to the sight. When you see a large tract of land lying fallow, as 
's sometimes the case in open districts, with no intervening patches of 
verdure, how unpleasant and uncomfortable is it to your eye! What then 
would be your sensations were the whole face of the earth bare, and not 
dressed by Flora? But such a state of things would soon take place if, to 
1 Amoreux, 288, 
.7 L have raised plants from this seed, which appear from the foliage to belong 
either to Phaseolus or Dolichos. 
av estivood Mod. Class of Ins. i. 830.; and in Loudon’s Gardener's Mag. No. 87. 
i 
A Markwick, Marsham, and Lehmann, in Linn, Trans, vi. 142—.; and Kirby in 
ditto, ix. 37. 42. n. 19, 23. 
© Keferstein in Silbermann’s Revue Ent, i. 135, 
H 
