“Two classes, then, dissimilar though related, are to be noted among the green lice of the rosebush and the black ones of the beanstalk, as also among countless others. The members of one class have no wings; they pass their lives where they were born, and multiply in serried legions. Those of the other class, which is relatively small, are equipped with wings. Confined to no one spot, they fare forth as some passing breeze or their own strength of wing may determine, and deposit in favorable localities the germs that are to serve each as the beginning of a community of wingless plant-lice. The first kind procreate on the spot with a fecundity almost beyond belief; the second take leave of the stationary family and go out to start new centers of population in various quarters. The first propagate without limit; the second colonize. “To soil the stem of a rose with a coating of lice is not exactly a capital offense; but to lay waste a field of beans, the hope of the farmer, is a far more serious matter. Yet even that is as nothing when compared with other depredations committed by plant-lice. There is a species of these insects that lives underground, subsisting on the roots of the grape-vine. Oh, the hateful creature! Never has agriculture known anything to equal the ravages it commits; no floods or droughts or inclement seasons have ever wrought such woes. Its terrible sucker has, up to the present time, caused us losses estimated at the fabulous sum of ten milliard francs. What a mouthful for a miserable little louse hardly visible to the naked eye! And to think that the combined efforts of nations cannot succeed in exterminating this pest! Alas, how feeble is mere force when confronted with the exceedingly minute infinitely multiplied! “This destroyer of the vine is known as the phylloxera, a name strange to our tongue, but losing nothing of its impressiveness in translation. ‘Phylloxera’ means ‘witherer of leaves.’ The plant-louse thus denominated does indeed cause the foliage of the vine to wither up—not acting on the leaves directly, it is true, but attacking the roots. These, done to death by the insect’s sucker, cease to draw from the soil the nourishment needed by the vine. The vine-stock wastes away, and with it the leaves, which become yellow and withered. “It is not merely the foliage, then, that the phylloxera dries up; it withers and kills the whole vine. Moreover, the name it bears was not invented expressly for it, but was borne by another before the ravager of vineyards became known. The louse that was first called phylloxera lived at the expense of the oak-tree and took up its station on the leaves, sucking the sap from them. There you have the true witherer of leaves. The vineyard louse has therefore inherited an old appellation which fails to indicate fully the seriousness of the creature’s depredations.