INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 109 
against which the florist is obliged to use various precautions to protect 
his choicest carnations, pinks, and dahlias from its ravages. 
Tn our stoves and greenhouses the Aphides often reign triumphant; for, 
if they be not discovered and destroyed when their numbers are small, 
their increase becomes so rapid, and their attack so indiscriminate, that 
every plant is covered and contaminated by them, beauty being converted 
into deformity, and objects before the most attractive now exciting only 
nausea and disgust. The coccus (C, Hesperidum) also, which looks like 
an inanimate scale upon the bark, does considerable injury to the two prime 
ornaments of our conservatories, the orange and the myrtle ; drawing off 
the sap by its pectoral rostrum, and thus depriving the plant of a portion 
of its nutriment, at the same time that it causes unpleasant sensations in 
the beholder from its resemblance to the pustule of some cutaneous 
disease. Similar injury is done by the mealy-bug (Coceus Adonidum L.) 
to many soft-leaved dicotyledonous plants, such as the coffee-tree, Justicia, 
&c., as well as to Musa, Canna, &c.; and various species of scale insects, 
separated from Coccus by Bouché under the names of Aspidiotus Nerii, 
Rosa, &c., attack the oleanders, roses, bays, cactuses, &c.; while the red 
spider (Erythreus telarius), spinning its web over the under surface of the 
leaves, draws out their juices with its rostrum, and thus enfeebles, and, if 
unmolested, in the end, destroys them. 
I must next conduct you from the garden into the orchard and fruitery ;—-— 
and here you will find the same enemies still more busy and successful in 
their attempts to do us hurt. The strawberry, which is the earliest 
and at the same time most grateful of our fruits, enjoys also the privi- 
lege of being almost exempt froin insect injury. A jumping weevil (Or- 
chestes Fragari@) is said by Fabricius to inhabit this plant; but as the 
same species is abundant in this country upon the beech, the beauty of 
which it materially injures by the numberless holes which it pierces in the 
leaves, and has, I believe, never been taken upon the strawberry, it seems 
probable that Smidt’s specimens might have fallen upon the latter from 
that tree? The only insect I have observed feeding upon this fruit is the 
ant, and the injury that it does is not material. The raspberry, the fruit of 
which arrives later at maturity, has more than one species of these animals 
for its foes. Its foliage sometimes suffers much from the attack of Me- 
lolontha horticola®, a little beetle related to the cockchafer: when in flower, 
the footstalks of the blossom are occasionally eaten through by a more 
minute animal of the same order, Byturus tomentosus, which I once saw 
prove fatal to a whole crop, and of which the larva feeds upon the 
fruit itself; and bees frequently anticipate us, and, by sucking the fruit 
with their proboscis, spoil it for the table. Gooseberries and currants, 
those agreeable and useful fruits, a common object of cultivation both to 
1 Kéllar on Ins, inj. to Gardeners, &c, 178—182. 
? This kind of misnomer frequently occurs in entomological authors. — ‘Thus, for 
instance, the Curculio (Rhynchites) Alliaria of Linné, feeds upon the hawthorn, and 
Curculio (Cryptorhynchus) Lapathi upon the willow (Curtis in Linn. Trans. i. 86.) ; 
but as Alliaria is common in hawthorn hedges, and docks often grow under willows, 
the mistake in question easily happened; when, however, such mistakes are dis- 
covered, the Trivial Name ought certainly to be altered. 
5 I consider this insect as the type of a new subgenus (Phyllopertha K. MS.), 
which connects those tribes of Melolontha ¥., that have a mesosternal prominence 
With those that have not. Of this subgenus I possess six species. It is clearly dis- 
tinct from Anisoplia, under which De Jean arranges it 
