APHIS. 
65 
of patches of potatoes, peas or beans, tliey are sure to be 
more infested than when in a close bed : the reason for 
this seems to me that the soil for all our culinaries is made 
as light as possible ; this is effected by constant digging, 
hoeing or raking : in a bed filled with gooseberry-bushes, 
on the contrary, there is but little moving of the earth go- 
ing on, and it gets trodden hard when the gooseberries are 
ripening, and commonly remains so through the year. 
This hardening of the soil prevents the grubs from burrow- 
ing when they come down from the bushes, so they go 
wandering about and become a prey to the hedge-spar- 
rows, house-sparrows, white throats, robins, and obese toads 
that are always on the look-out for them : it also prevents 
so feeble an insect as the fly fi'om forcing its way upwards 
from the cell in which it has changed; thus those on the 
surface and those under the surface are alike assailed by 
the simple expedient of hardening the soil. I have tried 
numberless experiments on the grubs themselves, and find 
them very easy to kill : brine, tobacco-water, snuff-water, 
and other mixtures are fatal ; but these remedies, like the 
once celebrated flea-poison, require the capture of the ani- 
mal in order to their being administered with effect. 
The true blight, or Aphis, is a quiet, dull, stupid look- 
ing animal, mostly without wings, but he sometimes has 
four, two of which are much larger than the other two, 
and fold over and hide them, reaching beyond the body 
and meeting together behind it ; these wings are generally 
as clear as crystal, with a few veins in them, yet if you 
hold the insect in the sunshine, and examine him through 
a glass, you will find they take all the colours of the rain- 
bow ; you will also find he has a long trunk or sucker, 
which is used as a pump or siphon, through which the 
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