102 INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 
millions as to extinguish it. Those that thus patriotically devoted them. 
selves to certain death for the common good, were but as the pioneers or 
advanced guard of a countless army, which by their self-sacrifice was 
enabled to pass unimpeded and unhurt. The entire crops of standing 
canes were burnt down, and the earth dug up in eyery part of the 
plantations. But vain was every attempt of man to effect their destruc- 
tion, till in 1780 it pleased Providence at length to annihilate them by the 
torrents of rain which accompanied a hurricane most fatal to the other 
West India Islands. This dreadful pest was) thought to have been im- 
ported. More recently great mischief has been done to the sugar planta- 
tions in the island of St. Vincent, by a species of mole-cricket (Gryllotalpa 
didactyla Latr.), which destroys the young shoots and bores into the plant?; 
and to those of the island of Granada by the Del/phaw saccharivora, an 
homopterous insect, allied to that producing the cuckoo-spit, which attacks 
the leaves in such numbers and with such yoracity, that some plantations 
which formerly made three hundred hogsheads of sugar per annum, had 
not made more than eighty or ninety in 1834, at which time, as stated by 
J. C. Johnstone, Esq., two thirds of the island were suffering from its 
ravages, and the insect was extending itself to the neighbouring islands,° 
Besides these enemies, the sugar-cane has also its Aphis, which sometimes 
destroys the whole crop*; and, according to Humboldt and Bonpland, the 
larva of Elater noctilucus feeds on it®,as do two weevils (Calandra Palma- 
rum and C, Sacchari, Guild.), whose history has been given by the late Rev. 
L. Guilding.® 
—~ Three other vegetable productions of the New World, cotton, tobacco, 
and coffee, which are also valuable articles of commerce, receive great 
injury trom the depredations of insects. M‘Kinnen, in his tour through 
the West Indies, states that in 1788 and in 1794 two thirds of the crop of 
cotton in Crooked Island, one of the Bahamas, was destroyed by the 
chenille (probably a lepidopterous larva’) ; and the ved bug, an insect 
equally noxious, stained it so much in some places as to render it of little 
or no value. Browne relates that in Jamaica a bug destroys whole fields 
of this plant, and the caterpillar of that beautiful butterfly Helicopis Cupido 
also feeds upon it. That of a hawk-moth, Sphina Carolina, is the greatest 
pest of tobacco: and it is attacked likewise by the larva of a moth, 
Phalena Rhewie Smith®, and by other insects of the names and kind of 
which I am ignorant; and the coffee plantations in Guadeloupe and other 
of the West Indian Islands are ravaged by the larve of a little moth 
(Blachista Coffcella).'° é 
Roots are another important object of agriculture, which, however, as to 
1 Castle in Philos. Trans. xxx. 346. 
2 Trans. nt. Soc, Lond. ii. proc. X. XxXiv. XXxi. 
Pi thie. Ent. Soc. Lond. i. proc. xxvii. Ixx. and Westwood, in Mag. Nat. Hist. 
vi. 407. 
4 Browne’s Civil and Nat. Hist. of Jamaica, 430, 
5 Pssai sur la Géographie des Plantes, 186. 
6 Westwood, Modern Class. of Ins: i. 347. 
7 At the meeting of the Entomological Society on the 6th June, 1842, Mr. W. W. 
Saunders read a memoir on Depressaria Gossypiella, a small moth, the caterpillar of 
which is very destructive to the cotton crops in India, 
8 M’Kinnen, 171. Browne, ubi supr. Merian, Jns. Sur. 10. 
9 Smith and Abbot, Znsects of Georgia, 199. 
10 Guévin-Méneyille, Rev. Zool, 1842, p, 24. 
