NIGGER. 
101 
ill the field at Old Pond, and the turnips were not. Since 
my last visit they had heen swept from the face of the 
earth. The land was everywhere as bare as on the day it 
had been sowed. There was no speck of green for the 
eye to rest on. It was a wild and universal desolation ; 
and the black, crawling vermin that had caused the ruin 
were clustered in bunches on the ground, or lingering 
about the skeletons of the turnip-leaves. No plague of 
Egypt could have been more effective : the mischief was 
complete. Some fields received the blast a few days later 
than others, but all had it : not one escaped, unless the 
crop were swedes, and it is remarkable that these were 
untouched. I will now give a somewhat more particular 
history of this blight. The egg is of an oblong form and 
pale colour, and is so firmly glued to the cuticle of the leaf, 
that I have never been able to get one off without break- 
ing it, but when the egg is removed it leaves, or rather 
discloses a wound in the cuticle of the leaf, and I have lit- 
tle doubt that this wound is made by the parent fly, in 
order that the egg itself may receive nourishment from the 
juices of the plant : this is perhaps a little hypothetical, 
but there is a fact which seems to require such an expla- 
nation, for the egg positively grows while still to all ap- 
pearance an egg. At the end of four days its bulk is 
nearly doubled, and by the ninth day, when the grub 
comes out, it is actually three times as large as when de- 
posited. Directly the young nigger is let out of the egg- 
shell he begins eating away in right earnest ; the first on- 
slaught is generally made as near as possible to the spot 
where he w as born, but after a day or two the edges of 
the leaf seem to be most favoured by his attentions, and 
here the whole family may be seen working with a will, 
