Page:White - The natural history of Selborne, and the naturalist's calendar, 1879.djvu/123

Rh in the bacon while it is drying; these eggs produce maggots called jumpers, which, harbouring in the gammons and best parts of the hogs, eat down to the bone, and make great waste. This fly I suspect to be a variety of the musca putris of Linnæus; it is to be seen in the summer in farm-kitchens on the bacon-racks and about the mantel-pieces, and on the ceilings.

The insect that infests turnips and many crops in the garden (destroying often whole fields while in their seedling leaves) is an animal that wants to be better known. The country people here call it the turnip-fly and black-dolphin; but I know it to be one of the coleoptera; the "chrysomela oleracea, saltatoria, femoribus posticis crassissimis." In very hot summers they abound to an amazing degree, and, as you walk in a field or in a garden, make a pattering like rain, by jumping on the leaves of the turnips or cabbages.

There is an oestrus, known in these parts to every ploughboy; which, because it is omitted by Linnæus, is also passed over by late writers; and that is the curvicauda of old Mouset, mentioned by Derham in his "Physico-Theology," p. 250; an insect worthy of remark for depositing its eggs as it flies in so dextrous a manner on the single hairs of the legs and flanks of grass-horses. But then Derham is mistaken when he advances that this oestrus is the parent of that wonderful star-tailed maggot which he mentions afterwards; for more modern entomologists have discovered that singular production to be derived from the egg, or the musca chamæleon; see Geoffrey, t. xvii. f. 4.

A full history of noxious insects hurtful in the field, garden and house, suggesting all the known and likely means of destroying them, would be allowed by the public to be a most useful and important work. What knowledge there is of this sort lies scattered, and wants to be collected; great improvements would soon follow of course. A knowledge of the properties, economy, propagation, and in short of the life and conversation of these animals, is a necessary step to lead us to some method of preventing their depredations.

As far as I am a judge, nothing would recommend entomology more than some neat plates that should well express the generic