INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 197 



march in long files, about three abreast, to any place where 

 sugar is kept ; and when they are saturated, return in the 

 same order, but by a different route. If the sugar, upon 

 which they are busy, be carried into the sun, they immediately 

 desert it. What is very extraordinary, these ants are also 

 fond of oil. Sweetmeats and preserves are very subject to be 

 attacked by a minute oblong transparent mite with very short 

 legs, and without any hair upon its body. Our butter and 

 lard are stated to be eaten by the caterpillar of a moth 

 (^Aglossa pinguinalis). Tyrophaga ^ casei, the parent fly of the 

 jumping cheese-maggot, loses no opportunity, we know, of 

 laying its eggs in our fresh cheeses, and when they get dry 

 and old the mite (Acarus siro) settles her colonies in them, 

 which multiply incredibly. Other substances, more unlikely, 

 do not escape from our pigmy depredators. Thus Reaumur 

 tells us of a little moth whose larva feeds upon chocolate, ob- 

 serving very justly that this could not have been its original 

 food.^ Both a moth and a beetle (^Sylvanus frumentarius ?) 

 were detected by Leeuwenhoek preying upon two of our spices^ 

 the mace and the nutmeg.^ The maggots of a fly (Drosophila 

 cellaris) are found in vinegar, in the manufactories of which 

 the perfect insects swarm in incredible numbers ; others I 

 have found in wine, which turned to a minute fly, of a yellow 

 colour, with dark eyes and abdomen, which, though near An- 

 thomyia as to its wings, appears to belong to a distinct genus 

 not published by Meigen, which in my MS. stands under the 

 name of Oinopota ventralis"^ ; and sometimes even water in the 



1 This name has long been given to this insect, and the characters of the 

 genus were drawn by Mr. Curtis before the publication of Meigen's fifth volume 

 (in which the genus is called Piophila); it is therefore retained. (See Curtis, 

 Brit. E7it. t. 126.) 



2 Reaum. iii. 276. 3 Leeuwenh. Epht. 99. 



4 Though our foreign wines, after being dei)osited in bottles in our cellars, 

 would seem secure from the attacks of insects, a friend of S. S. Saunders, Esq. 

 found, on removing his stock from one cellar to another, that the corks of many 

 of the bottles had been so eaten as to let the wine leak out. The authors of this 

 mischief seem to have been chiefly cockroaches, which had gnawed off the corks 

 of the claret only so far as they were unimpregnated w ith the wine ; but finding 

 the sweet flavour of the Persian shiraz and old hock more to their taste, had 

 encroached upon the corks of these so deeply as to allow the wine to escape. A 

 few individuals of two minute beetles, Cryptophagus cellaris and MzjccBtcea hirtdy 

 a minute Jcarus, and Atropos lignarius, were found on the corroded corks, but 

 seem more likely to have been attracted by the oozing wine than to have ori- 

 ginally caused the damage. ( Trans. Ent. Soc. Lond. i. proc. Iv.) Mr. Thwaitcs 



o 3 



