162 



INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 



upon this fruit is the ant, and the injury that it does is not 

 material. The raspberry, the fruit of which arrives later at 

 maturity, has more than one species of these animals for its 

 foes. Its foliage sometimes suffers much from the attack of 

 Melolontha horticola'^, a little beetle related to the cock- 

 chafer : when in flower, the footstalks of the blossom are 

 occasionally eaten through by a more minute animal of the 

 same order, Byturus tomentosus, which I once saw prove fatal 

 to a whole crop, and of which the larva feeds upon the fruit 

 itself; and bees frequently anticipate us, and, by sucking 

 the fruit with their proboscis, spoil it for the table. Goose- 

 berries and currants, those agreeable and useful fruits, a 

 common object of cultivation both to poor and rich, have 

 their share of enemies in this class. The all-attacking 

 Aphides do not pass over them, and the former especially are 

 sometimes greatly injured by them ; their excrement falling 

 upon the berries renders them clammy and disgusting, and 

 they soon turn quite black from it. In July, 1812, I saw a 

 currant-bush miserably ravaged by a species of Coccus, very 

 much resembling the Coccus of the vine. The eggs were of 

 a beautiful pink, and enveloped in a large mass of cotton-like 

 web, which could be drawn out to a considerable length. 

 Sir Joseph Banks once showed me a branch of the same 

 shrub perforated down to the pith by the caterpillar of 

 j^geria tipuliformis : the diminished size of the fruit pointing 

 out, as he observed, where this enemy has been at work. In 

 Germany, where, perhaps, this insect is more numerous, it is 

 said not seldom to destroy the larger bushes of the red 

 currant.^ The foliage of these fruits often suffers much 

 from the black and white caterpillar of Abraxas grossulariata, 

 and sometimes from those of Halias Vauaria ; but their 

 worst and most destructive enemy is that of a small saw-fly 



and CurcuUo ( Cryptorhynchus') Lapathi upon the willow ( Cui'tis in Linn. Trans. 

 i. 86.) ; but as Alliaria is common in hawthorn hedges, and docks often grow 

 under willows, the mistake in question easily happened : when, however, such 

 mistakes are discovered, the Trivial Name ought certainly to be altered. 



1 I consider this insect as the type of a new subgenus {Pliyllopertha K. MS.), 

 which connects those tribes of Mdolontha F., that have a mesosternal prominence 

 with those that have not. Of this subgenus I possess six species. It is clearly 

 distinct from Anisoplia, under which De Jean arranges it. 



2 Wiener Verzeich. 8vo. 29. 



