INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 171 



As soon as the buds open in the spring, it eats its way into 

 them, especially the fruit buds, and devours the germ of the 

 grape. Two or three of these caterpillars will so injure a vine, 

 by creeping from one germ to another, that it will bear no 

 fruit nor produce a single regular shoot the succeeding year.^ 

 In Italy, especially in Piedmont and Tuscany, the vines are 

 often devasted by the larva of another species of the same 

 genus, Procris ampelophaga Passerini^ ; in Germany a dif- 

 ferent species does great injury to the young branches, pre- 

 venting their expansion by the webs in which it involves 

 them^ ; and a fourth ( Tortrix fasciana) makes the grapes 

 themselves its food : a similar insect is alluded to in the threat 

 contained in Deuteronomy % while in France it is the cater- 

 pillar of a small moth, the Tortrix vitana Bosc. {Pyralis vi- 

 tana and Filler ana Fab., P. danticana Walck.), which does 

 the most injury by gnawing the footstalk of the leaves and 

 branches of grapes^, and of late years to such an extent in 

 the Maconnais and other districts, that the attention of the 

 government having been called to the mischief, under their 

 direction my lamented friend Professor Audouin was, at the 

 period of his untimely death, which Entomology so deeply 

 deplores, engaged on a fine work embracing a complete history 

 of the insect, with figures of it in every state, and an account 

 of the best means of destroying it. The worst pest of the 

 vine in this country is its Coccus ( C. vitis). This animal, which 

 fortunately is not sufficiently hardy to endure the common 

 temperature of our atmosphere, sometimes so abounds upon 

 those that are cultivated in stoves and greenhouses, that their 

 stems seem quite covered with little locks of white cotton ; 

 which appearance is caused by a filamentous secretion trans- 

 piring through the skin of the animal, in which they envelop 

 their eggs. Where they prevail they do great injury to the 

 plant by subtracting the sap from its foliage and fruit, and 

 causing it to bleed ^ ; and, to close the list without extending 



1 Pallas's Travels in S. Russia, ii. 241 . 



Memoria sopra due Specie d' in Setti noscivi, &c. 



3 Jacquin. Collect, ii. 97. 



4 Dent, xxviii. 39. 



s Walckenaer in ^ww. Soc. Ent. de France, iv. 687. ; Guerin, art. Pyr ale, Diet. 

 Fittoresque d'Hist. Nat. pp. 409 — 416. 



6 According to M. Walckenaer, in his elaborate and learned Essay on the In- 



