INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 115 
One of the most delicious, and at the same time most useful, of all our 
fruits is the grape: to this, as you know, we are indebted for our raisins, 
for our currants, for our wine, and for our brandy ; you cannot therefore 
hut feel interested in its history, and desire to be informed, whether, like 
those before enumerated, this choice gift of Heaven, whose produce 
“ cheereth God and man,”? must also be the prey of insects. There is a 
singular beetle, common in Hungary (Ledhrus Cephalotes), which gnaws 
off the young shoots of the vine, and drags them backward into its burrow, 
where it feeds upon them: on this account the country people wage con- 
tinual war with it, destroying vast numbers.* Fiye other beetles also 
attack this noble plant: three of them, mentioned by French authors 
(Rhynchites Bacchus, Eumolpus vitis, and Haltica oleracea), devour the 
young shoots, the foliage and the footstalks of the fruit, so that the latter 
is prevented from coming to maturity®; a fourth (C. corruptor Host), by a 
German, which seems closely allied to Otiorhynchus notatus, before men- 
tioned, if it be not the same insect, which destroys the young yines, often 
killing them the first year, and is accounted so terrible an enemy to them, 
that not only the animals, but even their eggs, are searched for and 
destroyed, and to forward this work people often call in the assistance of 
their neighbours.* And a fifth, Otiorhynchus sulcatus, also occasionally does 
considerable injury to the vine in this country, by gnawing off the young 
shoots.® Various lepidopterous larve are still more injurious to the vine. 
In the Crimea the small caterpillar of a Procris or Ino (genera separated 
from Sphinx L.), related to I. statices, is a most destructive enemy. As 
soon as the buds open in the spring, it eats its way into them, especially 
the fruit-buds, and devours the germ of the grape. Two or three of these 
caterpillars will so injure a vine, by creeping from one germ to another, 
that it will bear no fruit nor produce a single regular shoot the succeeding 
year.° In Italy, especially in Piedmont and Tuscany, the vines are often 
devastated by the larva of another species of the same genus, Procris 
ampelophaga Passerini™; in Germany a different species does great injury 
to the young branches, preventing their expansion by the webs in which it 
involves them®; and a fourth (Zortriv fasciana) makes the grapes them- 
selves its food: a similar insect is alluded to in the threat contained in 
Deuteronomy ®, while in France it is the caterpillar of a small moth, the 
Tortrie vitana Bose. (Pyralis vitana and Pillerana Fab., P. danticana 
Walck.), which does the most injury by gnawing the footstalk of the 
leaves and branches of grapes 1°, and of late years to such an extent in the 
Maconnais and other districts, that the attention of the government having 
1 That is, “ High and Low,” Judges, ix. 13, 
2 Sturm, Deutschland’s Fauna, i. 5. 
5 Latreille, Hist. Nat. xi. 66. 831.— According to Kéllar (163.), however, in 
Austria it is 2, betuleti, and not R. Bacchus which is injurious to the vines; and 
the case is the same, according to M. Silbermann, as to the vines of Alsatia and the 
banks of the Rhine. 
4 Host in Jucquin. Collect, iii. 297. 
© Westwood in Loudon’s Gardener's Mag. for April, 1837, 
6 Pallas’s Travels in S. Russia, ii. 241. 
7 Memoria sopra due Specie d’ Insetti noscivi, &c. 
8 Jacquin. Collect. ii. 97. 
® Deut. xxviii. 39, 
10 Walckenaer in Ann, Soc. Ent. de France, iv. 687.; Guérin, art. Pyrale, Dict. 
Pittoresque d’Hist. Nat. pp. 409 —416. 
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