affecting the Corn- Crops. 
Alb 
efficacious, must be persevered in for many successive years, and 
by all the farmers simultaneously. The sulphuric acid contained 
in peat-ashes, and liberatetl by rains, renders them very advan- 
tageous in destroying these insects : the ashes should be strewed 
thickly in the spring on the autumn-sown fields. 
It is true that these insects have not as yet been ascertained to 
have attacked the crops in England, like those we have recorded 
on the Continent : favourable circumstances, however, may increase 
their numbers, so as to render them at some future period a pest 
in this country, for the beetles are found scattered about. I have 
not unfrequently picked up specimens in August and September 
in sandy corn-fields in Norfolk, Kent, and the Isle of Wight, and 
they have been detected at the roots of grass nearer London ; 
several were also taken off umbellate plants in Hants;* and that 
they live through the winter has been ascertained by Mr. Tulk, 
><ho kept several individuals alive for many weeks during the 
winter of 1837-8 by feeding them on corn. j- 
We learn from Kollar that there is a species of beetle called the 
"Field Cockchaffer," which is injurious to corn. This insect 
likewise belongs to the Order Coleoptera, the Family Me- 
LOLONTHiD^, and the Genus Anisopli.\ ; the species was named 
by Linnaeus 
4. A. Agricola : head and thorax deep green, thickly and 
minutely punctured, with pale pubescence, and a channel down 
the middle : the head is narrowed before, forming a produced 
clypeus, with a recurved margin : antennae small and O-jointed, 
the little club beins trilobed : the eves are small and lateral : the 
thorax is twice as broad as the head, slightly narrowed before, 
the sides rounded, the base sinuated : elytra ovate, rather short, 
broad, shining rusty ochre, they are covered with crowded faint 
punctures and several indistinct striae ; a black square spot sur- 
rounds the scutellum, which is rather large, black, and semi- 
orbicular; the shoulders and external margin are irregularly 
black, and there is a curved interrupted piceous line across the 
back, but these spots are more or less ferruginous and brown in 
different varieties: wings ample: the two last segments of the 
abdomen are exposed, black, and densely clothed with yellowish 
white depressed hairs, as -well as the under side of the abdomen; 
the apex is conical and the hairs at the tip orange : the legs are 
strong and punctured, piceous with a greenish tint: the anterior 
tibiae are dilated and bi-lobed externally, the others are short, 
spiny, and spurred ; the tarsi are 5-jointed, the claws are unequal. 
* Curtiss Brit. Ent., fol. 188. 
t Kollar's Treatise on Insects, p. 91. 
