AGRICULTURAL REPORT. 
11s 
be discovered on the branches or leaves, as the young cocci are so 
minute as to be almost invisible to the naked eye. 
The plan of highly cultivating and enriching the soil has also been 
much recommended, as promoting a healthy, vigorous growth, and. 
strengthening the constitution of the tree, so that it is better enabled 
to withstand the attacks of these foes. Grease from fat bacon, rubbed 
on the trunk and main branches, or the rind or outside thick skin, 
placed in the fork of the branches, where the fat and salt may run 
down the main stem, is said by one person to have been of much 
benefit ; but others, who tried this plan, assert that the trees were 
killed in consequence of the application. In fact, so many different 
remedies have been recommended, and so many contradictory reports 
triven of the results, that it will not be prudent to place reliance upon 
any of them, until a regular series of experiments shall have been 
instituted with the various mixtures, upon trees of the same age and 
strength, in different soils and localities, and a faithful report given 
as to the success or failure— bearing always in mind, however, that 
although the old scale insect may be destroyed, yet millions of eggs 
may remain unhatched under the sheltering scales, waiting only for a 
few days’ genial sunshine to hatch and spread over the tree, which, 
perhaps, may have been washed in the meantime by heavy rains, so 
as not to leave a vestige of the mixture remaining to prevent the 
young from fixing themselves, ad libitum, when they first emerge 
from the sheltering scale. 
Another kind of scale insect (coccus) is also found upon the 
orange-trees, which measures about the tenth of an inch when fully 
grown, and is of a much more oval form than that already described. 
The young cocci were of a yellowish-white color, and bad the head 
and thorax somewhat defined by indentations on the sides, and marks 
on the scale itself. They are furnished with two antennas, and had 
six legs, by means of which they moved about the leaf until they 
found a place suited to their taste, when the} immediately fixed their 
piercers in a leaf or branch, and became coated with a scale-like cov- 
ering, which appeared to adhere to the surface of the place where it 
was fixed ; and here they remained motionless the remainder of their 
lives. 
This description applies to the female coccus alone, as the males 
were not discovered ; but doubtless they resemble the species already 
described, in being provided with wings, as well as in general habits. 
As the female scale becomes older, it gradually assumes a brownish- 
black appearance, having a somewhat lighter colored margin. This 
coccus appears to be peculiarly subject to the attacks of paiasitical 
insects, which serve materially to check its increase. Many of the 
scales were observed in September to be punctured with smalt holes 
in their backs, made no doubt by small parasitical flies, which had 
devoured the original tenant of the scale. One of the flies which 
came out of these scales measured about the twentieth of an inch in 
length ; the body and thorax were of a metallic green color ; the eyes 
black, and the legs of a brownish color ; the four wings were trans- 
parent, and the antennse jointed and hairy. 
