ead leaves just as they were before she touched them.
It was impossible that any one could discover this annular incision,
made, not like a cut, but more like the ripping or gnawing of animals or
those destructive insects called in different regions borers, or
turks, or white worms, which are the first stage of cockchafers. These
destructive pests are fond of the bark of trees; they get between the
bark and the sap-wood and eat their way round. If the tree is large
enough for the insect to pass into its second state (of larvae, in which
it remains dormant until its second metamorphose) before it has gone
round the trunk, the tree lives, because so long as even a small bit of
the sap-wood remains covered by the bark, the tree will still grow
and recover itself. To realize to what a degree entomology affects
agriculture, horticulture, and all earth products, we must know that
naturalists like Latreille, the Comte Dejean, Klugg of Berlin, Gene of
Turin, etc., find that the vast majority of all known insects live at
the sacrifice of vegetation; that the coleoptera (a catalogue of which
has lately been published by Monsieur Dejean) have twenty-seven thousand
species, and that, in spite of the most earnest research on the part of
entomologists of all countries, there is an enormous number of species
of whom they cannot trace the triple transformations which belong to
all insects; that there is, in short, not only a special insect to
every plant, but that all terrestrial products, however much they may
be manipulated by human industry, have their particular parasite. Thus
flax, after covering the human body and hanging the human being, after
roaming the world on the back of an army, becomes writing-paper; and
those who write or who read are familiar with the habits and morals
of an insect called the "paper-louse," an insect of really marvellous
celerity and behavior; it undergoes its mysterious transformations in
a ream of white paper which you have carefully put away; you see
it gliding and frisking along in its shining robe, that looks like
isinglass or mica,--truly a little fish of another element.

The borer is the despair of the land-owner; he works underground;
no Sicilian vespers for him until he becomes a cockchafer! If the
populations only realized with what untold disasters they are threatened
in case they let the cockchafers and the caterpillars get the
upper hand, they would pay more attention than they do to munici