i88. 5 ] 
Analyses oj Books. 
49 
Longman's Magazine. No. 25, November, 1884. London : 
Longmans and Co. 
The article which claims our attention in this number bears the 
title “ Honey Dew,” and is a study by Mr. Grant Allen, of 
aphides, especially in their relation to ants. Execrable as the 
former insedts are, there is much in their economy which is 
highly interesting. In no respedt do the ants appear more de- 
cidedly as enemies to man than by fostering and defending plant- 
lice. It has occurred that when a tree has, with great labour, 
been freed from these vermin, the ants have introduced a fresh 
colony. So that to clean a rosery or an orchard it is necessary 
to begin by treating the ants to liberal doses of corrosive subli- 
mate, carbolic acid, and where they have formed large nests, 
petroleum. 
Mr. Allen ventures the surmise — by no means improbable — 
that the species of insedts kept in a kind of domestication by ants 
have been “ produced by the ants themselves exactly as the dog, 
the sheep, and the cow in their existing types have been produced 
by deliberate human selection.” He quotes the observation of 
Sir J. Lubbock that the late autumnal eggs of aphides, laid on 
the food-plant of these insedls, are fetched under cover by the 
ants and carefully preserved till spring, when they are taken out. 
A reflection, which, if not original, deserves to be had in con- 
stant remembrance, is that “ whilst we can easily exterminate 
large animals such as the wolf and the bear in America, or the 
puma and the wolverene in the settled States of America, we 
should be so comparatively weak against the Colorado beetle or 
the fourteen years locust, and so absolutely powerless against the 
hop-fly, the turnip-fly, and the phylloxera.” One reason may be 
that inventors prefer devising new means for the slaughter of 
their fellow men, such as explosives, “ aerostats,” submarine 
boats, &c. 
Among the enemies of aphides Mr. Allen enumerates the lady- 
birds. He overlooks the Telephori, or as they are called by 
children in some parts of England, soldier- and sailor-beetles. 
These are far more aCtive and voracious than the lady-birds, and 
in some seasons even more common. 
Among vegetable remedies he enumerates tobacco — which is 
very efficacious — quassia and aloes, but makes no mention of 
Py rethrum voseum. 
3 E 
VOL. VI. (third series) 
