The Agricultural Pests of India

Abstract

CONSIDERABLE attention has been directed lately to agricultural pests of all kinds, and especially to insect pests, in various countries, because the injuries occasioned to crops by their agency have greatly increased, and in some instances altogether new disorders and diseases attributable to them have appeared. The universal international exchange of agricultural produce and other commodities has tended and must tend to distribute insects, fungi, and other sources of evil to mankind, animals, and plants, throughout the world. Thus the terrible scourge of the vine, the Phylloxera vastatrix, was first introduced into the French vineyards with plants, or cuttings, of vines imported from the United States. Very many insects most noxious to agricultural, fruit, and garden crops, in the United States were brought there with plants, cuttings, fruits, and seeds. The elm-leaf beetle, Galeruca xanthomelœma, which is now seriously damaging elm-trees, was not known in the United States until 1837, and came probably from France, or Germany, where it had been a troublesome pest long before that date. The hop fly, Aphis humuli, called the “barometer of poverty” by a Kentish historian of hop culture, has only recently visited the hop plantations of America; yet it caused almost a total blight last year in those of the Eastern States, upon an area of nearly 40,000 acres. Without any doubt this insect was conveyed from England in “hop-sets.” The Hessian fly has been conveyed to Great Britain by some means or other not yet discovered, during the last year, and bids fair to be a dangerous and permanent scourge to the wheat and oat crops of this country.

The Agricultural Pests of India and of Eastern and Southern Asia, Vegetable and Animal, Injurious to Man and his Products.

By Surgeon-General Edward Balfour, Author of "The Cyclopædia of India," &c. (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1887.)