196 INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 



a spoonful of soup cannot be taken free from them J Bread 

 is also devoured by Trogosita carahoides^ a larger beetle before 

 alluded to. 



Every one is aware that our animal food suffers still more 

 than our farinaceous from insects ; but perhaps you would not 

 expect that our hams, bacon, and dried meats should have 

 their peculiar beetle. Yet so it is ; and this beetle {Dermestes 

 lardarius), when a grub, sometimes commits great devastation 

 in them ; as does that of another described by De Geer under 

 the name of Tenehrio lardariusp- How much our fresh meat 

 of all kinds, our poultry and fish, are exposed to the flesh-fly, 

 whose maggots will turn us disgusted from our tables, if we 

 do not carefully guard these articles from being blown by 

 them, you well know; — and assailants more violent, hornets, 

 wasps, and the great rove-beetle (^Creophilus maxillosus), if 

 butchers do not protect their shambles, will carry ofl* no in- 

 considerable portion of their meat. A small cock-roach 

 {Blatta lapponica\ which I have taken upon our eastern coast, 

 swarms in the huts of the Laplanders, and will sometimes an- 

 nihilate in a single day, a work in which a carrion-beetle 

 (^Silpha lapponica) joins, their whole stock of dried fish.^ 

 The quantity of sugar that flies and wasps will devour if they 

 can come at it, especially the latter, the diminutive size of the 

 creatures considered, is astonishing: — in one year long ago, 

 when sugar was much cheaper than it is now, a tradesman 

 told me he calculated his loss, by the wasps alone, at twenty 

 pounds. A singular spectacle is exhibited in India (so Captain 

 Green relates) by a small red ant with a black head. They 



1 Sparrman, i. 103. This insect, by Swedish entomologists, is supposed to be 

 a species of Anohium F. (Ptinus L. ) ; but the specimen preserved in the Lin- 

 nean cabinet is Sylpha rosea of Mr. Marsham ( Cacidula pectoraHs Meg. ). A 

 small beetle of the first family of Cryptophagus Gyllenhal swarms often in the 

 ship biscuit, and may probably be the insect Sparrman here complains of under 

 the name of Dermestes paniceus. It is probable, however, that there is a mistake 

 as to the specimen in the Linnean cabinet, as there is no doubt that Anohium 

 paniceum Stephens is very injurious to biscuit, of which Mr. Raddon exhi- 

 bited to the Entomological Society several perforated in all directions by the 

 larv« of this insect, which, strange to say, he found to feed also on Cayenne 

 pepper. ( Trans. Ent. Sac. Lond. i. proc. Ixxxv. ii. proc. IxxL) 



2 De Geer, v. 46. This insect appears nearly related to Mr. Marsham's Cor- 

 ticaria pulla (E. B. i. 11. 14.; Latridius porcatus Herbst), if it be not the same 

 insect. 



3 Amcen. Acad. iii. 345. 



