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LETTER VL 

 INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 



INDIRECT INJURIES — continued. 



Having endeavoured to give you some idea of the mode in 

 which insects establish and maintain their empire over man 

 and his train of dependent animals, I shall next call your at- 

 tention to his living vegetable possessions, whether the produce 

 of the forest, the field, or the garden ; whether necessary to 

 him for his support, convenient for his use, or ministering to 

 his comfort, pleasure, and delight : — and here you will find 

 these little creatures as busily engaged in the work of mischief 

 as ever, destroying what is necessary, deranging what is con- 

 venient, marring what is beautiful, and turning what should 

 give us pleasure into an object of disgust. 



Let us begin with the produce of our fields. — Bread is 

 called the staff of life : " yet should Divine Providence in 

 anger be pleased to give the rein to the various insects which, 

 in the different stages of its growth, attack the plant producing 

 it, how quickly would this staff be broken ! From the moment 

 that wlieat begins to emerge from the soil, to the time when 

 it is carried into the barn, it is exposed to their ravages. One 

 of its earliest assailants in this country is that of which Mr. 

 Walford has given an account in the Linnean Transactions, 

 taking it for the fire-worm ; but, as Mr. Marsham observed, 

 not correctly, it being probably the larva of some coleo- 

 pterous insect, perhaps of one of the numerous tribe of Bra- 

 chyptera or rove-beetles which are not universally carnivorous. 

 This animal was discovered to infest the wheat in its earliest 

 stage of growth after vegetation had commenced ; and there 

 was reason to believe that it began even with the grain itself. 

 It eats into the young plant about an inch below the surface, 

 devouring the central part ; and thus, vegetation being stopped, 

 it dies. Out of fifty acres sown with this grain in 1802, ten 



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