74 NATURAL HISTOHY OP SELBORNE. 
which, harbouring in the gammons and best parts of the hogs, eat down 
to the bone, and make great waste. This fly I suspect to be a variety of 
the musca putris of Linnseus ; it is to be seen in the summer in farm- 
kitchens on the bacon-racks and about the mantel-pieces, and on the 
ceilings. 
The insect that infests turnips and many crops in the garden 
(destroying often whole fields while in their seedling leaves) is an 
animal that wants to be better known. The country people here call 
it the turnip-fly and black-dolphin ; but I know it to be one of the 
coleoptera ; the " chrysomela oleracea, saltatoria, femoribus posticis 
crassissimis." In very hot summers they abound to an amazing 
degree, and, as you walk in a field or in a garden, make a pattering 
like rain, by jumping on the leaves of the turnips or cabbages. 
There is an oestrus, known in these parts to every ploughboy ; 
which, because it is omitted by Linnseus, is also passed over by late 
writers ; and that is the curvicauda of old Mouset, mentioned by 
Derham in his " Physico-Theology," p. 250 ; an insect worthy of remark 
for depositing its eggs as it flies in so dextrous a manner on the single 
hairs of the legs and flanks of grass-horses. But then Derham is 
mistaken when he advances that this oestrus is the parent of that 
wonderful star-tailed maggot which he mentions afterwards ; for 
more modern entomologists have discovered that singular production 
to be derived from the egg, or the musca chamceleon j see Geoffroy, 
t. xvii. f. 4. 
A full history of noxious insects hurtful in the field, garden, and 
house, suggesting all the known and likely means of destroying them, 
would be allowed by the public to be a most useful and important work. 
What knowledge there is of this sort lies scattered, and wants to be 
collected ; great improvements would soon follow of course. A know- 
ledge of the properties, economy, propagation, and in short of the life 
and conversation of these animals, is a necessary step to lead us to some 
method of preventing their depredations.* 
* Many good papers have been published upon the insects injurious to the 
husbandman and gardener, and the Messrs. Loudon and Westwood, have trans- 
lated Roller's German treatise upon ''Noxious Insects." The harvest-bug as it 
is popularly termed, leptus autumnalis, Latreille, is generally very abundant 
where it does occur, and is extremely troublesome ; it is, however, local, most 
abundant in the south, and in Scotland by no means frequent ; it attacks both 
mankind and animals ; we have seen the nose of a dog literally red with their 
numbers. The fly attacking bacon-hams Mr. Bennet refers as similar to that 
which infests cheese, tyrojphaga casece, but of this I am not quite sure, and 
recommend some of our readers who may keep hams up their chimneys to send 
specimens to the "Gardener's Chronicle," who will submit them to their able 
entomologist Mr. Westwood. The insect most usually known as the ' ' turnip-fly " 
is, as Mr. White observes, a small beetle, haltica nemorum, by some called flea- 
beetle, from being an active jumper. This minute insect commits most serious 
depredations to the crops when in the seed-leaf, and some seasons a vast extent is 
destroyed. This present year, 1853, in the south of Scotland, it has been extremely 
destructive, and a very great breadth of crop has been sown a second time. The 
insect is very generally distributed, and I have never missed finding it among a 
young crop, but its depredations are most successful when dry weather or 
any other cause prevents the young plant from growing freely and vigorously. 
The best remedy, therefore, is to have the land well managed and in good 
condition from manure ; in most seasons this will have the effect of producing the 
young plants strong and healthy, and causing them to grow so rapidly as to be 
very soon beyond the ravages of the fly. A clergyman at Dorste, in Hanover, 
