166 INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 



there. It was therefore^ if not a native insect^ most probably- 

 derived from Is orth America^, from whence apple trees had 

 also been imported by the proprietor of that nursery. What- 

 ever its origin, it spread rapidly. At first it was confined to 

 the vicinity of the metropolis, where it destroyed thousands 

 of trees. But it has since found its way into other parts of 

 the kingdom, particularly into the cyder counties; and in 1810 

 so many perished from it in Gloucestershire, that, if some 

 mode of destroying it were not discovered, it was feared the 

 making of cyder must be abandoned. Sir Joseph Banks long 

 ago extirpated it from his own apple trees, by the simple me- 

 thod of taking off all the rugged and dead old bark, and then 

 scrubbino; the trunk and branches with a hard brush. ^ 



Even in the very commencement of their existence our 

 choicest apple trees are attacked by insects ; for the young 

 grafts, as I am informed by an intelligent friend, Mr. Scales, are 

 frequently destroyed, sometunes many hundreds in one night, 

 in the nurseries about London, by Curculio vastator Marsh. 

 ( Otiorhynchus notatus), one of the short-snouted weevils ; as 

 are in the neighbourhood of Warsaw the grafts of this and 

 other fruit trees by a smaller weevil Polydrusus (^Nemoicus) 

 ohlongus'-^i which with us eats the leaves of both apple and pear 

 trees. The blossoms, in common with those of the pear and 

 cherry, are attacked by the figure-of-eight moth {Episema 

 cceruleocephala), which Linne denominates the pest of Pomona; 

 and still mxore eiFectually by the grub of a reddish long-snouted 

 weevil (Antlioiiomus pomorum\ which eating both the blossom 

 and organs of fructification precludes all hope of fruit. If this 

 danger be escaped, and the fruit be set, it is then in Austria 

 often destroyed by Rliyncliites Bacchus, the same splendid 

 weevil which attacks the cherry; and Beaumur has given us the 



1 This Aphis is evidently the insect described in Uliger's Magazin, i. 450. 

 under the name of A. lanigera, as having done great injury to the apple-trees in 

 the neighbourhood of Bremen in 1801. That it is an Aphis and no Coccus is 

 clear from its oral rostrum and the wings of the male, of which Sir Joseph Banks 

 had an admirable drawing by Mr. Bauer. On this Aphis see Forsyth, 265. ; 

 Monthly Mag. xxxii. S20. ; and also for August, 1811. ; and Sir Joseph Banks 

 in the Horticultural Society's Transact iojis, ii. 162. Those Aphides that tran- 

 spire a cottony excretion are now considered, as before stated, as belonging to a 

 distinct genus, under the name of Lachnus, Illig. ; Myzoxyh, Blot ; Eriosoma, 

 Leach. 



2 Ann. Sac. Erit. de France, viii. Bull. viii. 



