112 INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. ’ 
by Joshua Haworth, jun. Esq., of Hull, that it equally infests other trees 
in the neighbourhood. Even the fruit of a golden pippin which he sent 
me were thickly beset with it. But the insect which most injures our 
apple-trees by drawing off their sap, and which has been known in this 
country only since the year 1787, is the apple-aphis, called by some the 
Coccus, and by others the American blight. This is a minute insect, covered 
with a long cotton-like wool transpiring from the pores of its body, which 
takes its station in the chinks and rugosities of the bark, where it increases 
abundantly, and, by constantly extracting the sap, causes ultimately the 
destruction of the tree. Whence this pest was first introduced is not 
certainly known. Sir Joseph Banks traced its origin to a nursery in 
Sloane Street ; and at first he was led to conclude that it had been im- 
ported with some apple-trees from France. On writing, however, to 
gardeners in that country, he found it to be wholly unknown there. It 
was therefore, if not a native insect, most probably derived from North 
America, from whence apple-trees had also been imported by the proprietor 
of that nursery. Whatever its origin, it spread rapidly. At first it was 
confined to the vicinity of the metropolis, where it destroyed thousands of 
trees. But it has since found its way into other parts of the kingdom, 
particularly into the cyder counties; and in 1810 so many perished from 
it in Gloucestershire, that, if some mode of destroying it were not dis- 
covered, it was feared the making of eyder must be abandoned. Sir Joseph 
Banks long ago extirpated it from his own apple-trees, by the simple 
method of taking off all the rugged and dead old bark, and then scrubbing 
the trunk and branches with a hard brush.? ‘ 
Even in the very commencement of their existence our choicest apple- 
‘trees are attacked by insects ; for the young gralts, as I am informed by an 
intelligent friend Mr. Scales, are frequently destroyed, sometimes many 
hundreds in one night, in the nurseries about London, by Curculio vastator 
Marsh. (Otiorhynchus notatus), one of the short-snouted weevils ; as are 
in the neighbourhood of Warsaw the grafts of this and other fruit-trees 
by a smaller weevil Polydrusus (Nemoicus) oblongus*, which with us eats the 
leaves of both apple and pear trees. The blossoms, in common with those 
of the pear and cherry, are attacked by the figure-of-eight moth (Zpisema 
ceruleocephala), which Linné denominates the pest of Pomona; and still 
more effectually by the grub of a reddish long-snouted weevil (Anthonomus 
pomorum), which, eating both the blossom and organs of fructification, 
precludes all hope of fruit. If this danger be escaped, and the fruit be 
set, it is then in Austria often destroyed by Rhynchites Bacchus, the same 
splendid weevil which attacks the cherry ; and Reaumur has given us the 
history of a species of moth common in this country (Carpocapsa pomonella), 
the caterpillar of which feeds in the centre of our apples, thus occasioning 
1 This Aphis is evidently the insect described in Iliger’s Magazin, i. 450. under 
the name of A. lanigera, as having done great injury to the apple-trees in the 
neighbourhood of Bremen in 1801. ‘That it is an Aphis and no Coccus is clear from 
its oral rostrum and the wings of the male, of which Sir Joseph Banks had an ad- 
mirable drawing by Mr. Bauer. On this Aphis see Vorsyth, 265.; Monthly Mag. 
xxxii. $20.; and also for August, 1811; and Sir Joseph Banks in the //orticultural 
Society's Transactions, ii. 162. ‘Those Aphides that transpire a cottony excretion 
are now considered, as before stated, as belonging to a distinct genus, under the 
name of Lachnus, Ilig.; Myzovyle, Blot; Eriosoma, Leach, 
2 Ann. Soc. Ent. de France, viii. Bull. viii. 
