affecting the Peas and Beans. 
423 
opaque appearance and often are of a duller tint : on picking oflF 
this little lid, a cavity will be found beneath, containing either a 
maggot, pupa, or beetle. On splitting one of the horse-beans 
(fig. 30), I found a pupa in the cell (fig. v), but most of them 
were occupied by the perfect insects. At a more advanced 
period the beans tell their own story, by the holes which are 
visible from whence the beetles had escaped or are ready to do 
so, as in the Russian beans (fig. 2S), where the tail of a beetle is 
visible at fig. t : on these beans were little dark dots, looking as if 
they had been made with a red-hot needle, which I have fre- 
quently observed in other samples ; at this point the husk is gene- 
rally indented and sometimes quite perforated. Whether these 
are caused by efforts of the larvaj to penetrate the seeds when 
first hatched from the egg, or from parasitic Ichneumons search- 
ing with their oviducts for a nidus for their ova. I cannot say. 
From the large horse-beans (fig. 29) most of the beetles had 
escaped, and their cells were occupied by other maggots, which 
will shortly deserve our attention. 
There is another important but neglected question to which we 
have more than once alluded in these essays,* namely, the effect 
of extensively infested crops upon the constitution and health of 
those who feed upon them, whether animals or man. We learn 
from the authors of the ' Introduction to Entomology,'t that M. 
Amoreux, a French author, alludes to " an alarm that was spread 
in some parts of France, in 1780, that people had been poisoned 
by eating worm-eaten peas, and they were forbidden by authority 
to be exposed for sale in the market ; but (it is added) the fears 
of the public were soon removed by the examination of some sci- 
entific men, who found the cause of the injury to be the insect of 
which I am now speaking [Briichus Pisi)." Here is an admis- 
sion of an injury done to the public by peas infested with the 
Brnchus Pisi ; and in December, 1845, I received a communica- 
tion from the Secretary of the Royal Polytechnic Institution, 
bearing directly upon this subject. Mr. Longbottom says, " I 
have been requested by the Bishop of Norwich to forward for 
your inspection the accompanying sample of beans lately brought 
from Sicily. They were purchased by a cabriolet proprietor for 
his horses, but finding that the health of the animals was much 
deranged from feeding on them, they were carefully examined, 
and almost all of them found to contain an insect." 
This sample of broad-beans, amounting to 37, contained 16 
that were infested by a Brnchus, some having only I, others 2 and 
3 in each, and about 6 or 7 of the beetles were alive at the time. 
* Roval Agric. Jour., vol. vii. p. 108. 
t 6th ed., vol. i. p. 143. 
