106 INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 
admired of all table vegetables, concerning which gardeners are most apt 
to pride themselves; and bestow much pains to produce in perfection, I 
mean the cauliflower, is often attacked by a fly, which, ovipositing in that 
part of the stalk covered by the earth, the maggots, when hatched, occasion 
the plant to wither and die, or to produce a worthless head.1_ Even when 
the head is good and handsome, if not carefully examined previous to 
being cooked, it is often rendered disgusting by earwigs that have crept 
into it, or the green caterpillar of Pontia Rape. In 1836, as we learn from 
Mr, Westwood, great injury was done in the market gardens to the west 
of London to the cauliflowers and other plants of the cabbage tribe by a 
species of aphis covered with a purple powder, which had not been before 
observed by the gardeners, who called it a new kind of blight.? 
Our peas, beans, carrots, parsnips, turnips, and potatoes are attacked in 
the garden by the same enemies that injure them in the fields*; I shall 
therefore dismiss them without further notice, and point out those which 
infest another of our most esteemed kinds of pulse, kidney beans. These 
are principally Aphides, which in dry seasons are extremely injurious to 
them, ‘The fluid which they secrete, falling upon the leaves, causes them 
sufficiently indicated the injurious effect of this interruption of the proper office of 
the sap. What was particularly remarkable, considering the locomotive powers ot 
these insects, was that the young turnips, sown in August after the wheat and rye, 
close to acres of Brussels sprouts (which all round Brussels are planted in the open 
fields among other crops), infested by myriads of these insects, were not more eaten 
by them than they usually are in England, and produced good average crops. It 
would seem, agreeubly to a fact which I shall mention in its place in speaking of the 
food of insects, that they prefer the taste of leaves to which they have been accus- 
tomed, to younger plants of the same natural family ; and hence perhaps the previous 
sowing of a crop of cabbage-plants in the corner of a field meant for turnips, might 
allure and keep there the great bull of these insects present in the vicinity, until the 
turnips were out of danger. 
1 Perhaps this fly is the same which Linné confounded with Zachina Larvarum, 
which he says he had found in the roots of the cabbage (Syst. Wat. 992. 78.). Isay 
“confounded,” because it is not likely that the same species should be parasitic in 
an insect, and also inhabit. vegetable. Itis obviously the same described by Kollar 
from Bouché under the name of Anthomyia Brassica (159.), which he states often 
destroys whole fields of cabbages by boring into the roots and stalks, 
2 Trans. Ent. Soc. Lond. ii. proc. xxi. 
5 On examining some young garden peas and beans about four inches high, £ 
observed the margins of the leaves to be gnawed into deep scollops by a little wee- 
vil (Sitona lineata), of which I found from two to eight on each pea and bean, and 
many in the act of eating. Not only were the larger leaves of every plant thus 
eroded, but in many cases the terminal young shoots and leaves were sapparently 
irreparably injured. I have often noticed this and another of the short-snouted Cur- 
culios (8, tibialis) in great abundance in pea and bean fields, but was not aware till 
now that either of them was injurious to these plants. Probably both are so, but 
whether the crop is materially affected by them must be left to further inquiry. 
Garden beans still more than the field kinds, Mr. Curtis informs us, greatly suffered 
in 1841, from the holes which humble bees (Bombus terrestris and lucorum) made in 
the blossoms (as they usually do) to get out the honey contained in the nectary, 
which operation injuring the pods in their earliest state, four-fifths of them were 
destroyed, ‘and produced no beans, (Curtis in Gardener's Chron. 1841, p. 485.) 
When at Shrewsbury in August 1839, I found almost every pod of the garden peas 
brought to market inhabited by a single yellowish-white epidopterous larva, three 
or four lines long, which had eaten more or less of each pea, but which, though 
several assumed the pupa state and entered the earth in the box in which they were 
placed, never became perfect moths. ’ 
