Hardwicke's science-gossip : an illustrated medium of interchange and gossip for students and lovers of nature . e sometimes, especially in the autumn,to be met with on the sea-coast, or the banks oflarge rivers. Many years ago, those of the Humberwere so thickly strewed with the common ladybird,that it was difficult to avoid treading on years afterwards I noticed a mixture ofspecies, collected in vast numbers, on the sand-hillson the sea-shore at the north-west extremity ofNorfolk. My friend, the Rev. Peter Lathbury,made long since a similar observation at Orford, onthe Suffolk coas
Hardwicke's science-gossip : an illustrated medium of interchange and gossip for students and lovers of nature . e sometimes, especially in the autumn,to be met with on the sea-coast, or the banks oflarge rivers. Many years ago, those of the Humberwere so thickly strewed with the common ladybird,that it was difficult to avoid treading on years afterwards I noticed a mixture ofspecies, collected in vast numbers, on the sand-hillson the sea-shore at the north-west extremity ofNorfolk. My friend, the Rev. Peter Lathbury,made long since a similar observation at Orford, onthe Suffolk coast; and about five or six years agothey covered the cliffs of all the watering-places onthe Kentish and Sussex coasts, to the no small alarmof the superstitious, who thought them forerunnersof some direful evil. The Reading Mercury informs us that the autho-rities of a Berkshire town were alarmed in October,1835, by a most formidable invasion of these beau-tiful insects, and that the parish engines, as well asprivate ones, were called into requisition, withtobacco-fumigated water, to attack and 5 W « o Fig. 156. Ladybird (Coccinella 7-punctata),a, larva; b, pupa; c, perfect insect. Curtis informs us that the ladybirds hybernateand pass the winter in the crevices of paling andtrunks of trees under loose bark, in dry leaves, onthe ground, &c, and are therefore ready on theshortest notice to come from their hiding-places,from which they are allured by the sunny clays ofDecember, and on the approach of spring areamongst our first vernal visitors, when the femalelays her little eggs beneath leaves, close together,in clusters of about fifty. They are cylindrical, buff-coloured, and set on one end; from these, littlesprawling larvse soon issue, of a lead colour, gailyornamented with orange or scarlet spots, and aresoon spread over the leaves of trees, palings, grassin fields; indeed, everywhere in the vicinity of the plant-lice, to which they are much more formidabletha
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