“This last-named insect is a tiny yellowish louse, plump of body, but hardly discernible to untrained eyes, its length being barely three quarters of a millimeter. It lives in clusters on the minute ramifications of the roots wherever the bark is tender enough to enable it to push in its sucker. Its ranks are so dense that the infested rootlets wear a continuous coating of vermin which stains the fingers with yellow. It lays its eggs in little heaps in the interstices that occur in the swarming colony; and these eggs are oval in shape and sulphur-yellow at first, but turn brownish as the moment for hatching approaches. “From these eggs there come, in a few days, new layers of eggs, which settle down beside the earlier comers and add their own progeny to the already overgrown family. Thus, as long as the season continues favorable, these myriad numbers of successive generations are added to the existing myriads, until the thread-like rootlets become completely hidden by the accumulated layers of eggs and the eggs themselves. “Riddled with punctures, the rootlets swell up at intervals and present the appearance of a string of elongated seeds. Thus deformed, fatally injured in their delicate suckers, the roots cease to imbibe the nutritive juices of the soil, the famished vine languishes for a time, putting forth only feeble shoots that are incapable of bearing fruit, and at last the whole plant dries up and dies. To secure its own prosperity the louse has killed its nurse.” CHAPTER LIII THE PHYLLOXERA (Continued) “The yellow plant-louse found on the roots of the grape-vine,” resumed Uncle Paul, “has no bent for traveling: wingless, sluggish, and big-bellied, it is ill adapted to locomotion. Where once its sucker has implanted itself, there the creature is glad to abide as long as the place is tenable. But when the rootlet dies and begins to decay, then a new refectory must be sought out, with a better-furnished table. Accordingly the louse has to move. A persistent explorer, it knows how, with patience and in course of time, to make its way through cracks in the soil from one root to another, and dares even to climb to the surface, where, proceeding in the open air, it emigrates from the exhausted vine-stock to the neighboring one rich in sap; and there it pushes down to the roots through some fissure in the ground. “To this slow-goer a single one of our steps would be a journey of excessive length. Therefore, to propagate its kind far and wide, it must have other and quicker means than the extremely deliberate method of locomotion just described. This other method for planting colonies at a considerable distance has already been illustrated for us by the green louse of the rosebush. Like that species, the phylloxera has a special division of winged travelers, and it is these that propagate the race throughout the grape-growing district.