150 
the fly itself are of trivial efficiency ; the leaves 
which have rows of eggs upon them may be ad- 
vantageously hand-picked; and all attacks upon 
the larve themselves ought to be made as soon 
as possible after they appear. Gentle blows may 
_ be given to the bush to shake them down; quick- 
lime may be cautiously sprinkled in sufficient 
quantity to make them drop; a wash of lime- 
water may be applied cold; a liquid preparation 
or decotion of soft soap and a little tobacco may 
be squirted on lukewarm; or hot water, of the 
temperature of from 120° to 140° Fahrenheit, 
may be forcibly thrown with a watering-pot or a 
forcing-pump. If attempts be postponed till the 
period of the pupa-state of the insect, they must 
be directed entirely to the soil around the in- 
fested bushes ; and may consist in a drenching 
with cattle urine, or in a thick coating of sea- 
wrack, or in the depositing of a layer of un- 
slaked lime about an inch or so beneath the 
surface, in such a way that all the heat evolved 
during the process of natural slaking will be con- 
fined within the region occupied by the pupee. 
The turnip saw-fly, Athalia spinarum, belongs 
to a genus which comprises 5 or 6 other British 
species, and requires to be rather minutely 
known in order to be distinguishable from these. 
The genus Athalia has short and somewhat club- 
shaped antenne, nine or ten jointed in the male, 
apparently eleven-jointed in the female, the third 
one as long or longer than any other two,—long 
six-jointed maxillary palpi, the radical joint 
| shortest,—four-jointed labial palpi, the joints 
nearly of equal length,—thick-based mandibles, 
terminating in a curved claw with a tooth,—two- 
lobed maxille, with the one lobe ovate-ended, 
and the other long and pointed,—and superior 
wings with two marginal and four submarginal 
cells. The species Athalia spinarum is from 3 
to 3} lines long, exclusive of the antenne ; and 
has been described as follows:—“ Head wider 
than long, deep black, with three ocelli in the 
centre; eyes oval; antenne black above, and for 
the most part dull yellow beneath ; labrum and 
palpi light yellow; thorax black above, with a 
triangular space in front, the scutellum and a 
spot behind it reddish-orange ; the collar, which 
is rather long and slender, black on the sides and 
yellow in the middle; abdomen rather short, 
entirely orange-yellow, inclining to red, with a 
small black spot on each side of the first seg- 
ment ; legs likewise orange-yellow, the tarsi paler, 
approaching to whitish, the tip of the tibie and 
of each of the tarsal joints black; the tibie with 
two spines at the apex, and the joints of the tar- | 
sus each with a very slender lobe beneath ; ex- 
tremity of the ovipositor black ; wings yellowish 
at the base, the costa and stigma black.” But 
several slight varieties occur ; ‘and in particular, 
the thorax is sometimes entirely black, and the 
scutellum is often of the same colour. The eggs 
are deposited on the young turnip-plants, for the 
most part round the outer margin of the leaf, in 
———————E nr re 
SAW-FLIES. 
the early part of summer; and, if the weather 
be favourable, are very soon hatched. The larve 
are at first small, but grow rapidly, and in the 
course of a few weeks attain their full size. 
They have at first a deep black colour; but, after 
their last moult, they have a dark lead or slate 
grey colour. They are known by a number of 
popular names, which allude to either their 
colour or their ravages, such as blacks, black 
caterpillar, nigger, canker, &c. They attack 
the turnip-plants as soon as they are hatched, 
and eat voraciously, and sometimes destroy the 
whole crop, and seldom do Jess injury than to 
occasion dwarfishness in a large proportion of 
the bulbs; and, when they are touched, or in any 
way disturbed, they coil themselves up, and re- 
main motionless; and, when full grown, they 
cease to eat, and either bury themselves in the 
soil or take refuge among moss, rotten leaves, or 
other rubbish, there to undergo their transfor- 
mation into pupe. The havoc done by these 
devastators in 1835 and some subsequent years 
was so great as materially to affect the interests 
of British agriculture; and the rapidity of it 
was sometimes such as to astonish and bewilder 
farmers, who were not acquainted with the saw- 
fly’s habits. A distinct warning is given to 
ordinarily observant cultivators by the appear- 
ance of the flies themselves about a fortnight 
before the ravages of the larvee can commence ; 
and the sad retribution awaits any farm where 
the larvee appear and are not destructively dealt 
with, that, after passing into the pupe state, 
they give origin in about 20 days, to a fresh race 
of flies, whose larvee will destroy a-re-sown or 
second turnip crop. Yet though many preven- 
tive and remedial means have been tried, really 
effective ones are either not uniform or com- 
paratively critical, dear, or difficult. 
The destruction of the turnip saw-flies them- 
selves is a prime» remedy, in so much that the 
killing of every individual fly is the prevention 
of an entire colony or succession of colonies of 
larve. The flies are so sluggish and inactive, 
and so seldom fly speedily or to a distance, that 
they can easily be caught by means of a small 
bag-net or even by the hand. A distinguished 
farmer in Yorkshire states. in the Highland 
Society’s Transactions, that he always instructs 
his turnip-hoers to leave their work and chase 
and destroy every saw-fly they see, and that, 
simply in consequence, as he believes, of this one 
precaution, his turnip-fields have escaped injury 
while others in the same parish were more or less 
consumed. Swallows eat the flies, and sometimes 
skim over the fields in search of them, and then 
do valuable service; and rooks also make such 
sweeping attacks upon the caterpillars, that they 
have been known to act as complete conserva- 
tors of a turnip crop in the vicinity of a rookery. 
Applications of wood-ashes, coal-ashes, quick- . 
lime, unslaked lime, soot, saline mixtures, saline 
solutions, preparations of arsenic, and other sub- 
