INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 



151 



producing the cuckoo-spit, which attacks the leaves in such 

 numbers and with such voracity, that some plantations which 

 formerly made three hundred hogsheads of sugar per annum, 

 had not made more than eighty or ninety in 1834, at which 

 time, as stated by J. C. Johnstone, Esq., two thirds of the 

 island were suffering from its ravages, and the insect was 

 extending itself to the neighbouring islands.^ Besides these 

 enemies, the sugar-cane has also its Aphis, which sometimes 

 destroys the whole crop ^ ; and, according to Humboldt and 

 Bonpland, the larva of Elater noctilucus feeds on it ^, as do 

 two weevils {Calandra Palmarum and C. Sacchari Guild.), 

 whose history has been given by the late Rev. L. Guilding.* 

 Three other vegetable productions of the New^ World, 

 cotton^ tobacco, and coffee, which are also valuable articles of 

 commerce, receive great injury from the depredations of 

 insects. M^Kinnen, in his tour through the West Indies, 

 states that in 1788 and 1794 two-thirds of the crop of cotton 

 in Crooked Island, one of the Bahamas, was destroyed by the 

 chenille (probably a lepidopterus larva ^); and the red bug, an 

 insect equally noxious, stained it so much in some places as to 

 render it of little or no value. Browne relates that in Jamaica 

 a bug destroys whole fields of this plant, and the caterpillar 

 of that beautiful butterfly Helicopis Cupido also feeds upon 

 it.^ That of a hawk-moth. Sphinx Carolijia, is the greatest 

 pest of tobacco : and it is attacked likewise by the larva of 

 a moth, Phalcena RhexicB Smith 7, and by other insects of the 

 names and kind of which I am ignorant; and the coffee 

 plantations in Guadeloupe and other of the West Indian Is- 

 lands are ravaged by the larv93 of a little moth {Elachista 

 Coffeellay 



Roots are another important object of agriculture, which, 



' Trans, Ent. Soc. Lond. i. proc. xxvii. Ixx. and Westwood, in Mag. Nat. 

 Hist. vi. 407. 



2 Browne's Civil and Nat. Hist, of Jamaica, 430. 



3 Essai sur la GSographie des Flantes, 136. 



4 Westwood, Modern Class, of Ins. i. 347. 



s At the meeting of the Entomological Society on the 6th June, 1842, Mr. 

 W. W. Saunders read a memoir on Depressaria Gossypiella, a small moth, the 

 caterpillar of which is very destructive to the cotton crops in India. 



6 M'Kinnen, 171. Browne, uhi supr. Merian, Ins. Sur. 10. 



7 Smith and Abbot, Insects of Georgia, 199. 



8 Guerin-Meneville, Rev. Zool. 1842, p. 24. 



L 4 



