Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 1 (1877).djvu/483

Rh to the soil, as the wood is fit for nothing—not even for fuel. On all the other estates they had the same story to relate, and at the end of the year 1839 not one of those noble palm trees remained alive, which, to the number of 20,000, had graced this barren island only a year before.

"As for the appearance of the insect which caused this calamity, I can only say that, like other larvæ of Aleyrodes, it was not even so big as the head of the smallest pin in common use, and was of nearly circular outline, but quite flat, and as thin as the finest paper. It never moved that I could see, and seemed as if glued to the leaf, on which myriads of them were huddled together.

"Having thus been an eye-witness in the case, you may judge of my astonishment when, only last year, I was informed here at the Hague by a professional entomologist of some repute, that from the communication of a friend of his who visited Curaçao many years after the above-mentioned occurrence, he felt convinced that the cocoa-nut trees in that island have been destroyed by the caterpillar of a nocturnal lepidopteron. This absurd notion I have not been able to dispel, not even by producing extracts from the colonial newspaper, because, said he, although it appears therefrom that the colonists hold the same opinion as I do, yet the question remained whether that opinion is the right one. In reply, I can only say that I never expected an entomologist to believe on mere hearsay that any butterfly will soar to a height of sixty to eighty feet above the ground to lay its eggs in trees which have so little to attract them as those of the order Palmæ, whose leaves, from their texture, are unfit to serve as food for the larvae of Lepidoptera.

"Passing from this subject to that of the destruction of the cocoa-nut trees in the coast regions of Guiana, here in Holland it seems nobody ever heard of those trees suffering from insects in Surinam. I beg to refer to Mr. Russell's report on the Aleyrodes, as well as on the beetle, which, long before the arrival of the first-mentioned insect, about three or four years ago, used to spoil the said trees in those districts, and which report must have reached you long since, as it was read at one of the monthly meetings of the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society in Demerara, and printed in the 'Royal Gazette' (George Town, British Guiana), of the 4th March, 1876.

"From that paper, I see, Mr. Russell says his friend Dr. Whitlock calls the beetle Passalus tridens, which, so far as I know, may be very correct, though, judging from the appearance of one I saw in the museum at Leyden, I should not have thought it capable of boring holes which have been compared by Mr. Russell to those made by means of an augur. Among the eight species of Passalus enumerated by Dr. Dalton, in his 'History of British Guiana,' I do not find this one; but, of course, that is no reason why it should not be found there, as the author himself does not pretend to