Footnote 4041: (return)The butterflies I have seen in these wonderful migrations in Ceylon were mostly Callidryas Hilariæ, C. Alcmeone, and C. Pyranthe, with straggling individuals of the genus Euplæa, E. Coras, and E. Prothoe. Their passage took place in April and May, generally in a north-easterly direction. The natives have a superstitious belief that their flight is ultimately directed to Adam's Peak, and that their pilgrimage ends on reaching the sacred mountain. A friend of mine travelling from Kandy to Kornegalle, drove for nine miles through a cloud of white butterflies, which were passing across the road by which he went.
Footnote 4053: (return)Of the family of Elateridæ, one of the finest is a Singhalese species, the Campsosternus Templetonii, of an exquisite golden green colour, with blue reflections (described and figured by Mr. WESTWOOD in his Cabinet of Oriental Entomology, pl. 35, f. 1). In the same work is figured another species of large size, also from Ceylon, this is the Alaus sordidus.—WESTWOOD, l. c. pl. 35, f. 9.
Footnote 4071: (return)The engraving on the preceding page represents in its various transformations one of the most familiar and graceful of the longicorn beetles of Ceylon, the Batocera rubus.
Footnote 4072: (return)There is a paper in the Journ. of the Asiat. Society of Ceylon, May, 1845, by Mr. CAPPER, on the ravages perpetrated by these beetles. The writer had recently passed through several coco-nut plantations, "varying in extent from 20 to 150 acres, and about two to three years old: and in these he did not discover a single young tree untouched by the cooroominiya."—P. 49.
Footnote 4101: (return)M. aridifolia and M. extensicollis, as well as Empusa gongylodes, remarkable for the long leaf-like head, and dilatations on the posterior thighs, are common in the island.
Footnote 4113: (return)Palpares contrarius, Walker; Myrmeleon gravis, Walker; M. dirus, Walker; M. barbarus, Walker.
Footnote 4121: (return)It becomes an interesting question whence the termites derive the large supplies of moisture with which they not only temper the clay for the construction of their long covered ways above ground, but for keeping their passages uniformly damp and cool below the surface. Yet their habits in this particular are unvarying, in the seasons of droughts as well as after rain; in the driest and least promising positions, in situations inaccessible to drainage from above, and cut off by rocks and impervious strata from springs from below. Dr. Livingstone, struck with this phenomenon in Southern Africa, asks: "Can the white ants possess the power of combining the oxygen and hydrogen of their vegetable food by vital force so as to form water?"—Travels, p. 22. And he describes at Angola, an insect4123 resembling the Aphrophora spumaria; seven or eight individuals of which distil several pints of water every night.—P. 414. It is highly probable that the termites are endowed with some such faculty: nor is it more remarkable that an insect should combine the gases of its food to produce water, than that a fish should decompose water in order to provide itself with gas. FOURCROIX found the contents of the air-bladder in a carp to be pure nitrogen.—Yarrell, vol. i. p. 42. And the aquatic larva of the dragon-fly extracts air for its respiration from the water in which it is submerged. A similar mystery pervades the inquiry whence plants under peculiar circumstances derive the water essential to vegetation.
Footnote 4131: (return)Dr. HOOKER, in his Himalayan Journal (vol. i. p. 20) is of opinion that the nests of the termites are not independent structures, but that their nucleus is "the debris of clumps of bamboos or the trunks of large trees which these insects have destroyed." He supposes that the dead tree falls leaving the stump coated with sand, which the action of the weather soon fashions into a cone. But independently of the fact that the "action of the weather" produces little or no effect on the closely cemented clay of the white ants' nest, they may be daily seen constructing their edifices in the very form of a cone, which they ever after retain. Besides which, they appear in the midst of terraces and fields where no trees are to be seen: and Dr. Hooker seems to overlook the fact that the termites rarely attack a living tree; and although their nests may be built against one, it continues to flourish not the less for their presence.
Footnote 4161: (return)For these particulars of the termes monoceros, I am indebted to Mr. Thwaites, of the Roy. Botanic Garden at Kandy.
Footnote 4171: (return)It belongs to the genus Pelopæus, P. Spinolæ, of St. Fargean. The Ampulex compressa, which drags about the larvæ of cockroaches into which it has implanted its eggs, belongs, to the same family.
Footnote 4172: (return)Mr. E.L. Layard has given an interesting account of this Mason wasp in the Annals and Magazine of Nat. History for May, 1853. "I have frequently," he says, "selected one of these flies for observation, and have seen their labours extend over a period of a fortnight or twenty days; sometimes only half a cell was completed in a day, at others as much as two. I never saw more than twenty cells in one nest, seldom indeed that number, and whence the caterpillars were procured was always to me a mystery. I have seen thirty or forty brought in of a species which I knew to be very rare in the perfect state, and which I had sought for in vain, although I knew on what plant they fed.
"Then again how are they disabled by the wasp, and yet not injured so as to cause their immediate death? Die they all do, at least all that I have ever tried to rear, after taking them from the nest.
"The perfected fly never effects its egress from the closed aperture, through which the caterpillars were inserted, and when cells are placed end to end, as they are in many instances, the outward end of each is always selected. I cannot detect any difference in the thickness in the crust of the cell to cause this uniformity of practice. It is often as much as half an inch through, of great hardness, and as far as I can see impervious to air and light. How then does the enclosed fly always select the right end, and with what secretion is it supplied to decompose this mortar?"
Footnote 4181: (return)It ought to be remembered in travelling in the forests of Ceylon that sal volatile applied immediately is a specific for the sting of a wasp.
Footnote 4182: (return)At the January (1839) meeting of the Entomological Society, Mr. Whitehouse exhibited portions of a wasps' nest from Ceylon, between seven and eight feet long and two feet in diameter, and showed that the construction of the cells was perfectly analogous to those of the hive bee, and that when connected each has a tendency to assume a circular outline. In one specimen where there were three cells united the outer part was circular, whilst the portions common to the three formed straight walls. From this Singhalese nest Mr. Whitehouse demonstrated that the wasps at the commencement of their comb proceed slowly, forming the bases of several together, whereby they assume the hexagonal shape, whereas, if constructed separately, he thought each single cell would be circular. See Proc. Ent. Soc., vol. iii. p. 16.
Footnote 4183: (return)A gentleman connected with the department of the Surveyor-General writes to me that he measured a honey-comb which he found fastened to the overhanging branch of a small tree in the forest near Adam's Peak, and found it nine links of his chain or about six feet in length and a foot in breadth where it was attached to the branch, but tapering towards the other extremity. "It was a single comb with a layer of cells on either side, but so weighty that the branch broke by the strain."
Footnote 4184: (return)Xylocopa tenuiscapa, Westw.; Another species found in Ceylon is the X. latipes, Drury.
Footnote 4201: (return)Mr. Jerdan, in a series of papers in the thirteenth volume of the Annals of Natural History, has described forty-seven species of ants in Southern India. But M. Nietner has recently forwarded to the Berlin Museum upwards of seventy species taken by him in Ceylon, chiefly in the western province and the vicinity of Colombo. Of these many are identical with those noted by Mr. Jerdan as belonging to the Indian continent. One (probably Drepanognathus saltator of Jerdan) is described by M. Nietner as occasionally "moving by jumps of several inches at a spring."
Footnote 4202: (return)Dr. DAVY, in a paper on Tropical Plants, has introduced the following passage relative to the purification of sugar by ants:
"If the juice of the sugar-cane—the common syrup as expressed by the mill—be exposed to the air, it gradually evaporates, yielding a light-brown residue, like the ordinary muscovado sugar of the best quality. If not protected, it is presently attacked by ants, and in a short time is, as it were, converted into white crystalline sugar, the ants having refined it by removing the darker portion, probably preferring that part from it containing azotized matter. The negroes, I may remark, prefer brown sugar to white: they say its sweetening power is greater; no doubt its nourishing quality is greater, and therefore as an article of diet deserving of preference. In refining sugar as in refining salt (coarse bay salt containing a little iodine), an error may be committed in abstracting matter designed by nature for a useful purpose."
Footnote 4271: (return)There is another variety of the same moth in Ceylon which closely resembles it in its markings, but in which I have never detected the uttering of this curious cry. It is smaller than the A. Satanas, and, like it, often enters dwellings at night, attracted by the lights; but I have not found its larvæ, although that of the other species is common on several widely different plants.
Footnote 4281: (return)The Portuguese had made the attempt previous to the arrival of the Dutch, and a strip of land on the banks of the Kalany river near Colombo, still bears the name of Orta Seda, the silk garden. The attempt of the Dutch to introduce the true silkworm, the Bombyx mori, took place under the governorship; of Ryklof Van Goens, who, on handing over the administration to his successor in A.D. 1663, thus apprises him of the initiation of the experiment:—"At Jaffna Palace a trial has been undertaken to feed silkworms, and to ascertain whether silk may be reared at that station. I have planted a quantity of mulberry trees, which grow well there, and they ought to be planted in other directions."—VALENTYN, chap. xiii. The growth of the mulberry trees is noticed the year after in a report to the governor-general of India, but the subject afterwards ceased to be attended to.
Footnote 4291: (return)The species of moth with which it is identified has not yet been determined, but it most probably belongs to a section of Boisduval's genus Bombyx allied to Cnethocampa, Stephens.
Footnote 4301: (return)Another caterpillar which feeds on the jasmine flowering Carissa, stings with such fury that I have known a gentleman to shed tears while the pain was at its height. It is short and broad, of a pale green, with fleshy spines on the upper surface, each of which seems to be charged with the venom that occasions this acute suffering. The moth which this caterpillar produces, Neæra lepida, Cramer; Limacodes graciosa, Westw., has dark brown wings, the primary traversed by a broad green band. It is common in the western side of Ceylon. The larvæ of the genus Adolia are also hairy, and sting with virulence.
Footnote 4303: (return)The singular instincts of a species of Thecla, Dipsas Isocrates, Fab., in connection with the fruit of the pomegranate, were fully described by Mr. Westwood, in a paper read before the Entomological Society of London in 1835.
Footnote 4331: (return)Amongst the specimens of this order which I brought from Ceylon, two proved to be new and undescribed, and have been named by Mr. A. WHITE Elidiptera Emersoniana and Poeciloptera Tennentina.
Footnote 4332: (return)Such as Cantuo ocellatus, Leptoscelis Marginalis, Callidea Stockerius, &c. &c. Of the aquatic species, the gigantic Belostoma Indicum cannot escape notice, attaining a size of nearly three inches.
Footnote 4341: (return)Culex laniger? Wied. In Kandy Mr. Thwaites finds C. fuscanns, C. circumcolans, &c., and one with a most formidable hooked proboscis, to which he has assigned the appropriate name C. Regius.
Footnote 4342: (return)The precise species of insect by means of which the Almighty signalised the plague of flies, remains uncertain, as the Hebrew term arob or oror which has been rendered in one place. "Divers sorts of flies," Ps. cv. 31; and in another, "swarms of flies," Exod. viii. 21, &c., means merely "an assemblage." a "mixture" or a "swarm," and the expletive. "of flies" is an interpolation of the translators. This, however, serves to show that the fly implied was one easily recognisable by its habit of swarming; and the further fact that it bites, or rather stings, is elicited from the expression of the Psalmist, Ps. lxxviii. 45, that the insects by which the Egyptians were tormented "devoured them," so that here are two peculiarities inapplicable to the domestic fly, but strongly characteristic of gnats and mosquitoes.
Bruce thought that the fly of the fourth plague was the "zimb" of Abyssinia which he so graphically describes: and WESTWOOD, in an ingenious passage in his Entomologist's Text-book. p. 17, combats the strange idea of one of the bishops, that it was a cockroach! and argues in favour of the mosquito. This view he sustains by a reference to the habits of the creature, the swarms in which it invades a locality, and the audacity with which it enters the houses; and he accounts for the exemption of "the land of Goshen in which the Isrælites dwelt," by the fact of its being sandy pasture above the level of the river; whilst the mosquitoes were produced freely in the rest of Egypt, the soil of which was submerged by the rising of the Nile.
In all the passages in the Old Testament in which flies are alluded to, otherwise than in connection with the Egyptian infliction, the word used in the Hebrew is zevor, which the Septuagint renders by the ordinary generic term for flies in general, [Greek: muia], "musca" (Eccles. x. 1, Isaiah vii. 10); but in every instance in which mention is made of the miracle of Moses, the Septuagint says that the fly produced was the [Greek: kunomyia], the "dog-fly." What insect was meant by this name it is not now easy to determine, but ÆLIAN intimates that the dogfly both inflicts a wound and emits a booming sound, in both of which particulars it accords with the mosquito (lib. iv, 51); and PHILO-JUDÆUS, in his Vita Mosis, lib. i. ch. xxiii., descanting on the plague of flies, and using the term of the Septuagint, [Greek: kunomyia], describes it as combining the characteristic of "the most impudent of all animals, the fly and the dog, exhibiting the courage and the cunning of both, and fastening on its victim with the noise and rapidity of an arrow"—[Greek: meta roizou kathaper belos]. This seems to identify the dog-fly of the Septuagint with the description of the Psalmist, Ps. lxxviii. 45, and to vindicate the conjecture that the tormenting mosquito, and not the house-fly, was commissioned by the Lord to humble the obstinacy of the Egyptian tyrant.
Footnote 4361: (return)The following notice of the "coffee-bug," and of the singularly destructive effects produced by it on the plants, has been prepared chiefly from a memoir presented to the Ceylon Government by the late Dr. Gardner, in which he traces the history of the insect from its first appearance in the coffee districts, until it had established itself more or less permanently in all the estates in full cultivation throughout the island.
Footnote 4363: (return)Figs. 2, and 3 and 5 in the engraving, where these and all the other figures are considerably enlarged.
Footnote 4371: (return)Fig. 4. Mr. WESTWOOD, who observed the operation in one species, states that they escape backwards, the wings being extended flatly over the head.
Footnote 4381: (return)Figs. 6 and 7. There are many other species of the Coccus tribe in Ceylon, some (Pseudococcus?) never appearing as a scale, the female wrapping herself up in a white cottony exudation; many species nearly allied to the true Coccus infest common plants about gardens, such as the Nerium Oleander, Plumeria Acuminata, and others with milky juices; another subgenus (Ceroplastes?), the female of which produces a protecting waxy material, infests the Gendurassa Vulgaris, the Furrcæa Gigantea, the Jak Tree, Mango, and other common trees.
Footnote 4382: (return)REAUMUR has described the singular manner in which this occurs. Mem. tom. iv.
Footnote 4394: (return)Of the parasitic Chalcididiæ, many genera of which are well known to deposit their eggs in the soft Coccus, viz.: Encystus, Coccophagus, Pteromalus, Mesosela, Agonioneurus; besides Aphidius, a minutely sized genus of Ichneumonidæ. Most, if not all, of these genera are Singhalese.
Footnote 4401: (return)Racodium? Species of this genus are not confined to the coffee plant alone in Ceylon, but follow the "bugs" in their attacks on other bushes. It appears like a dense interlaced mesh of fibres, each made up of a single series of minute oblong vesicles applied end to end.
Footnote 4421: (return)The entire of the new species contained in this list have been described in a series of papers by Mr. WALKER in successive numbers of the Annals of Natural History (1858-61): those, from Dr. TEMPLETON'S collection of which descriptions have been taken, have been at his desire transferred to the British Museum for future reference and comparison.