ENTOMOLOGY.
To kill Insects in Greenhouses.—Mr. W. W. Saunders stated, at a recent meeting of the Entomological Society, that for some years he had used spirits of wine in his greenhouses for cleansing plants and clearing them from insects; he mixed the rectified spirits and pure water in equal proportions, and this mixture, which was found to answer better than undiluted spirit, was applied with a brush. It was very efficacious in the destruction of the common mealy bug (especially when young) and other common pests, and he recommended it as worthy of application in the greenhouse generally.
Small Tortoiseshell Butterfly.—"The larvæ of this insect (Vanessa Urticæ), and, I surmise, of the genus Vanessa in general, are remarkably exempt from the attacks of Ichneumons. Thus I collected (at random from various places), last July, about forty nearly adult larvæ of this insect. Every one of these became a pupa, and emerged in due time. I observe that in rearing butterfly larvæ, if from insufficient or inappropriate food they have not attained their due size when they enter the pupa state, they make their appearance thereafter with the wings perfect, but are of diminutive size. With moths, on the contrary, under the like circumstances, the wings are shrivelled and imperfect."—The Entomologist.
Death to Flies!—A grocer in Cathcart-street, Glasgow, being annoyed at the superabundance of the fly tribe in his shop, and being of a speculative turn of mind, invested in a halfpenny fly-paper, which he placed in the window, on a plate and a little water. After it had lain thus for a week, of the usual turn over of the window on Wednesday afternoon, an immense number of dead flies were collected from it. Astonished at the result, curiosity led the young man to put them in the scale, when he found their combined weight to be two ounces and a quarter. He thereafter tried two drams weight, and on counting them found there were 600 in it. Thus upon calculation it appeared that the two ounces and a quarter would contain 10,800 dead flies. Besides these, it is considered that nearly half as many more would be dusted out of the window during the week, making a grand total of 15,000 of the tribe slaughtered in a week by this housewife's benefactor.—Glasgow Morning Journal.
Galls.—At the meeting of the Entomological Society, held November 7th, Mr. W. W. Saunders exhibited some galls which he had recently found on the roots of an oak tree, at a depth of four feet below the surface, and from which had since emerged a number of specimens of a Cynips (C. aptera?), the whole of which were females. Also three other kinds of gall, which he had found in Switzerland, two of them upon species of willow, and the third formed on the leaves of the beech. Mr. Stainton also exhibited a gall of a woolly texture, found on an oak near Bath.
Sheep-rot or Liver-fluke.—The rot in sheep is but too well known as one of the most destructive pests connected with what may be termed the animal economy of agriculture. Its ravages have been in some seasons so extensive as to produce a scarcity in the kind of stock which constitutes the most general and wholesome kind of our ordinary animal food, as well as a very important medium in carrying out the necessary rotation of crops. A writer in the Edinburgh Veterinary Review, quotes by Dr. Cobbold, says, that "in the season of 1830-31, the estimated deaths of sheep from rot was between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000. Supposing," proceeds our author, "the number to have been 1,500,000, this would represent a sum of something like £4,000,000 sterling. . . . As instances of its disastrous effects upon the revenues of agriculturists, we may cite the statements of Duvaine, and also individual cases recorded by Simonds. 'In the neighbourhood of Arles alone, during the year 1812, no less than 300,000 sheep perished, and at Nîmes and Montpelier 90,000. In the inner departments, during the epidemic of the years 1853-54, many cattle-breeders lost a fourth, a third, or even three-fourths of their flocks.' . . . On the estate of Mr. Cramp, of the Isle of Thanet, the rot epidemic of 1834 swept away £3,000 worth of his sheep in less than three months, compelling him to give up his farm. Scores of cases are on record where our English farmers have lost three, four, five, six, seven, and even eight hundred sheep in a single season, and many agriculturists have thus become completely ruined." It is superfluous to inform our readers that all this wholesale and ruinous mischief is the effect of the existence of the "liver-fluke" (Fasciola hepatica) in the liver of the animal. The number of flukes inhabiting a single sheep's liver is sometimes very considerable. "Bidloo obtained 800, Leuwenhoeck about 900, and Duprey upwards of 1,000 specimens. The bile contained in the liver-ducts is loaded with flukes' eggs. In some cases there cannot be less than tens, or even hundreds, of thousands."—Athenæum, on Dr. Cobbold's Entozoa.
Heroic Names of Butterflies—"In the vast multitude of butterflies, the greatest part of which are foreign and extra-European, and to whose food and manner of life we are utter strangers, it was impossible to give significant trivial names. Linnæus, therefore, by way of simile, has taken the names of the Equites from the Trojan history. They