INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 105 
bulb shoots, called fingers and toes, be occasioned by insects, is not cer- 
tainly known.? Another root, the Beet, which has within the last twenty 
years been almost as extensively cultivated in France for the manufacture 
of sugar as turnips with us, is much injured by a small beetle, a new 
species of Cryptophagus described by M. Macquart (C. Bete), which 
deyours the plants as soon as they appear above ground.” 
We have wandered long enough about the fields to observe the progress 
of insect devastation: let us now return home to visit the domains of 
Flora and Pomona, that we may see whether their subjects are exposed 
to equal maltreatment. If we begin with the kitehen-garden, we shall find 
that its various productions, ministering so materially to our daily comfort 
and enjoyment, almost all suffer more or less from the attack of the 
animals we are considering.—Thus, the earliest of our table dainties, 
radishes, ave devoured by the maggot of a fly (Anthomyia Radicum), assisted 
by those of a very small beetle (Latridius porcatus*), and our lettuces by 
the caterpillars of several species of moth ; one of which is the beautiful 
tiger-moth (Huprepia Caja), another the pot-herb moth ( Mamestra ole- 
vacea), a third anonymous, described by Reaumur, as beginning at the 
root, eating itself a mansion in the stem, and so destroying the plant before 
it cabbages.4 And when they are come to their perfection and appear fit 
for the table, their beauty and delicacy are often marred by the troublesome 
earwig, which, insinuating itself into them, defiles them with its excrements ; 
while the seed is often nearly wholly destroyed (as was the case in Suffolk 
in 1836 and the three following years) by the grubs of a fly (Anthomyia 
Lactuce Bouché) which live in the involucre, and feed on the seeds and 
receptacle.® What more acceptable vegetable in the spring than brocoli ? 
Yet how dreadfully is its foliage often ravaged in the autumn by numerous 
hordes of the cabbage-butterfly ; so that, in an extensive garden, you will 
sometimes see nothing left of the leaves except the veins and stalks, — 
What more useful, again, than the cabbage? Besides the same insect,* 
which injures them in a similar way, and a species of field-bug (Pentatoma 
ornata), which pierces the leaves like a sieve®, in some countries they are 
infested by the caterpillar of a most destructive moth (Mamestra Brassice), 
to which [ have before alluded ; which, not content with the leaves, pene- 
trates into the very heart of the plant.’ One of the most delicate and 
gion Observations on the Disease in Turnips called Fingers and Toes, Tull, 
, SvO. 
2 Ann. Se. Nat. xxiii. 94. quoted by Westwood, Mod. Class. of Ins. i. 148. 
5 Kyber in Germar’s Mag. der Entom. i. 1. 
4 Reaum, ii, 471. 
5 Curtis in Gardener's Chronicle, 1841, p. 363. 
® Kéllar on Ins. inj. to Gardeners, &e. p. 148. 
_” De Geer, ii, 440. In the summer of 1826, when at Brussels, I observed that de- 
licious vegetable of the cabbage tribe so largely cultivated there under the name of 
Jets de choux, and which in England we call Brussels sprouts, to be materially in- 
jured in the later stages of its growth by the attacks of the turnip-flea, and other 
little beetles of the same genus (/altica), which were so numerous and so universally 
prevalent, that I scarcely ever examined a full-grown plant from which a vast num- 
ber might not have been collected, Some plants were almost black with them, the 
Species most abundant being of a dark copper tinge. They had not merely eroded 
the cuticle in various parts, so as to give the leaves a brown blistered appearance, 
but had also eaten them into large holes, at the margin of which I often saw them 
in the act of gnawing; and the stunted and unhealthy appearance of the plants 
