Insect miscellanies / [by James Rennie].

  • James Rennie
Date:
1831
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Insect miscellanies / [by James Rennie]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    happens, for (with a few exceptions, such as the pro- pensity of some quadrupeds to crop the young shoots of the yew,) nothing will induce them to eat any plant which is not their natural food; and we have frequently remarked that when cut herbage was given to domestic animals they would toss aside the species they did not like, and even reject them when they accidentally got into their mouths with others. Grass is very commonly eaten by them all; but of other plants, the horse, the cow, the sheep, the goat, and the hog make each their favourite selections,—the goat, for example, feeding greedily on the water- hemlock (Cicuta virosa), which is a deadly poison to cows Insects, it would appear, are still nicer than cattle in their selection of food, and of course in the acuteness of their taste. The caterpillar of the antler moth (Charceas grammis, Stephens), though it feeds on a variety of grasses, and sometimes com- mits such ravages in the meadows of Sweden as to endanger the lives of the cattle for want of food, does not touch the fox-tail grass {Alopecurus); yet to us the leaves of this grass taste little, if anything, different from some of those which it so greedily devours. The caterpillar of the ringlet-butterfly {Hipparchia HyperanthuSy Fabr.), again, feeds only on one spe- cies of grass, the annual poa (Poa annua), while the caterpillar of the gate-keeper {H. Pamphilus) confines itself to the dog’s-tail grass {Cynosurus cristatus) f. De Geer remarked that a sort of caterpillar, found indifferently on the poplar and the sallow, would only eat the leaves of the sort of tree on which it was hatched; for those hatched on the poplar would ra- * See Limiaeus, Lachesis Lapponica ; Horticultural Jourii, p. 242 ; and Insect Transformations, p. 78, f Stewart’s Elements, ii. 131—69,
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