VINE-COCCUS. 
123 
ence of the bitter blast, unrequited love. Even now the 
wind is whistling under the door of my little room, in spite 
of a leather binding, and heaving up my carpet into the 
most unseemly convexities ; while the feathery snow is 
driving in horizontal lines past my window ; yet at this 
moment I hear the loud, monotonous song of the missel- 
thrush, bravely defying wind and weather. 
Our vines are often annoyed, and sometimes rendered 
barren, by an insect which is called the vine-gall, or Vine- 
Coccus. The harm it does the vines is by pricking holes 
in the rind, and thereby letting out the sap, or, as the gar- 
deners scientifically term it, making the vines bleed. Our 
climate is not hot enough for this insect to breed very fast 
out of doors ; but in hothouses it thrives and swarms, of- 
ten doing great mischief. Sometimes there are such hosts 
of them, that the young shoots are covered with a white 
cotton, which is in reality a resinous gum, produced by the 
Cocci. The Coccus pierces the bark by means of a sharp 
and long sucker, which goes to the very centre of the 
shoot, causing the sap instantly to flow in abundance. 
This piercing apparatus, although, like other insects' 
mouths, in the head, is bent so far under the breast, that 
it appears to proceed from that part, and I find has been 
often so described. The Cocci in the young, or larva state, 
are all alike; they look just exactly like little tiny tor- 
toises fixed to the rind and sometimes the leaves, of the 
vine. Like other animals, the Cocci are males and fe- 
males ; the males are desperate rovers. When they are 
tired of vegetating, they push a hole through the back of 
their tortoise-like shell and fly away ; the females undergo 
no change in form on coming of age, nor do they ever 
break loose from their moorings. 
