No. 509] ECOLOGY OF INDIAN CORK PLANT 287 



principal groups of this series are ninety species of 

 Coleoptera, fifty-six species of larvae of Lepidoptera, 

 forty-five species of Hemiptera and twenty-five species 

 of Orthoptera. The other insect orders are represented 

 by seven or eight species of Diptera and one or two of 

 Hymenoptera. Every part of the plant is liable to in- 

 festation by these insects, but the leaves and the roots 

 yield the principal supplies of insect food, either in the 

 form of sap and protoplasm sucked from their substance 

 by Hemiptera, or in that of tissues and cells devoured 

 by the subterranean larvae of Coleoptera, and by cater- 

 pillars, grasshoppers and beetles, feeding above ground. 



Lack of Special Adaptations 

 Notwithstanding the great number of these insects, and 

 the variety and importance of the injuries which they 

 frequently inflict upon the corn plant, there is little in its 

 structure or its life history to suggest any special adapta- 

 tion of the plant to its insect visitants— no lure to insects 

 capable of service to it, or special apparatus of defense 

 against those able to injure it. The fertilization of its 

 seed is fully provided for without reference to the agency 

 of insects. It has no armature of spines or bristly hairs 

 to embarrass their movements over its surface or to 

 defend against their attack its softer and more succulent 

 foliage. It secretes no viscid fluids to entangle them, 

 and forms no chemical poisons or distasteful compounds 

 in its tissues to destroy or to repel them. The cuticle of 

 its leaf is neither hardened nor thickened by special de- 

 posits ; its anthers are neither protected nor concealed ; 

 and its delicate styles are as fully exposed as if they were 

 the least essential of its organs. Minute sucking insects 

 are able at all times to pierce its roots and its leaves with 

 their flexible beaks, and with the single exception of its 

 fruit there is no part of it which is not freely accessible 

 at anv time to any hungry enemy. Only the kernel, 

 which is supposed to have been lightly covered in the 

 wild corn plant by a single chaffy scale or glume, has 



