INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 117 
padella), is often so numerous as to defoliate the apple trees by the road 
sides for miles.1_ Three species of beetles also, Rhynchites alliaria, which in 
the larva state bores into the young shoots, and Nemoicus oblongus and 
Phyllopertha horticola, which attack the leaves as perfect insects, join their 
lepidopterous brethren in Germany in a general assault on fruit-trees. 
If we quit the orchard and fruit-garden for a walk in our plantations and 
groves, we shall still be forced to witness the sad effects of insect devasta~ 
tion ; and when we see, as sometimes happens, the hedges and trees en- 
tirely deprived of their foliage, and ourselves of the shade we love from 
the fervid beam of the noonday sun ; when the singing birds have deserted 
them; andall their music, which has so often enchanted us by its melody, 
yariety, and sweetness has ceased—we shall be tempted in our hearts 
to wish the whole insect race was blotted from the page of creation. 
Numerous are the agents employed in this work of destruction. Amongst 
the beetles, various cockchafers (Melolontha vulgaris, Amphimalla_solsti- 
tialis, and Phyllopertha horticola), in their perfect state, act as conspicuous 
apart in injuring the trees as their grubs do in destroying the herbage. 
Besides the leaves of the fruit-trees, they devour those of the sycamore, 
the lime, the beech, the willow, and the elm. They are sometimes es- 
pecially the common one, astonishingly numerous. Mouffet relates (but 
one would think that there must be some mistake in the date, since they are 
never so early in their appearance) that on the 24th of February, 1574, 
such a number of them fell into the river Severn as to stop the wheels of 
the water-mills.? It is also recorded in the Philosophical Transactions, 
that in 1688 they filled the hedges and trees of part of the county of Gal- 
way in such infinite numbers, as to cling to each other in clusters like bees 
when they swarm; on the wing they darkened the air, and produced a 
sound like that of distant drums. When they were feeding, the noise of 
.their jaws might be mistaken for the sawing of timber, Travellers and 
people abroad were very much annoyed by their continual fying in their 
faces ; and in ashort time the leaves of all the trees for some miles round 
were so totally consumed by them, that at midsummer the country wore 
the aspect of the depth of winter.® 
But the criminals to whom it is principally owing that our groves are 
sometimes stripped of the green robe of summer are the various tribes of 
Lepidoptera, especially the nightfliers or moths, myriads of whose cater- 
pillars, in certain seasons, despoil whole districts of their beauty, and our 
walks of all their pleasure. Some of these, like the cockchafers, or the 
caterpillars of Clisiocampa neustria, Porthesia chrysorrhea, &c., before men- 
tioned as attacking most fruit-trees, are also general feeders on forest 
trees, though some of the species usually prefer particular kinds when 
accessible. Thus in 1731 the oaks of France were terribly devastated 
by the larva of Hypogymna dispar‘; as ave often those of Germany by that 
1 Loudon’s Gardener's Mug, Oct. 1837. 
® Mouffet, 160. 
5 Philos. Trans. xix. 741. 
4 Reaum. i. 887. ‘These larve were so extremely numerous in 1826 on the lines 
of the Allée Verie at Brussels, that many of the trees of that noble avenue, though 
of great age, were nearly deprived of their leaves, and afforded little of the shade 
which the unusual heat of the summer so urgently required. The moths which in 
autumn proceeded from them, when in motion towards night, swarmed like bees, and 
subsequently on the trunk of eyery tree might be seen scores: of females depositing 
13 ‘ 
