INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 143 



pod, and thus destroy it. Something similar, I have been 

 told (I suspect it is a short-snouted weevil), occasionally in- 

 jures beans. In this country, however, the mischief caused by 

 the Bruchus is seldom very serious ; but in North America 

 another species {B. pisi), which is also found here, but not to 

 any very injurious extent, is most alarmingly destructive, its 

 ravages having been at one time so universal as to put an 

 end in some places to the cultivation of that favourite pulse. 

 No wonder, then, that Kalm should have been thrown into 

 such a trepidation upon discovering some of these pestilent 

 insects just disclosed in a parcel of peas he had brought from 

 that country, lest he should be the instrument of introducing 

 so fatal an evil into his beloved Sweden.^ In the year 1780 

 an alarm was spread in some parts of France, that people had, 

 been poisoned by eating worm-eaten peas, and they were 

 forbidden by authority to be exposed for sale in the market ; 

 but the fears of the public were soon removed by the examin- 

 ation of some scientific men, who found the cause of the 

 injury to be the insect of which I am now speaking.^ 

 Another species of Bruchus (B. pectinicornis) devours the 

 peas in China and Barbary. A leguminous seed, much used 

 when boiled as food for horses in India, known to Europeans 

 by the name of Gram, but in the Tamul dialect called Koloo, 

 and by the Moors Cooltee, is the appropriate food of a fourth 

 kind of Bruchus, related to the last, but having the antennae, 

 which in the male are pectinated, much shorter than the 

 body. It is, perhaps, B, scutellaris, A parcel of this 

 seed^ given me by Captain Green was full of this insect, 

 several grains containing two. Indeed, in tropical climates, 

 the seeds of almost every pod-bearing plant, as of the genera 

 Gleditsia, Theohroma, Mimosa, Rohinia, &c., are eaten by 

 some species of Bruchus, as are the cocoa-nut and palm-nut.* 

 Molina, in his History of Chili, tells us of a beetle, which he 

 names Lucanus pilmus, that infests the beans in that country ; 

 — a circumstance quite at variance with the habits of the 



1 Kalm's Travels, i. 173. 2 Amoreux, 288. 



3 I have raised plants from this seed, which appear from the foliage to belong 

 either to Phaseolus or Dolichos. 



* Westwood, Mod. Class, of Ins. i. 330, ; and in Loudon's Gardener's Mag, 

 No. 87. p. 287. 



