of commerce is produced from small nopaleries
belonging to Indians who are very poor. These
people establish their nopal plantations on cleared
ground, on the mountain-slopes, two or three
leagues from their villages. Each planter buys
stock in the spring in the shape of a few branches
of cactus laden with small cochineals recently
hatched, known as semilla, or seeds. Such
branches are sold for about half-a-crown the
hundred. They are kept for twenty days within
the huts, then placed in the open air under a
shed, and in August and September, the succulency
of the plant having kept life in the cactus
branches, the female insects, big with young,
are gathered and strewed on the nopals to breed.
In about four months the first gathering is made,
of a twelvefold increase, and there may be two
more profitable harvests in the course of the
year. The cochineal has to be gathered from
the nopal with great care; the Indian women
squat, therefore, for hours before a single cactus,
brushing at the insects with a squirrel's tail.
They are killed by boiling water, by exposure
in heaps to the sun, or by drying in ovens. It
takes seventy thousand of the dried insects to
make a pound of cochineal, and England alone
consumes one hundred and fifty thousand pounds
of cochineal, or ten thousand and five hundred
millions of insects. Cochineal, still produced
most abundantly in Mexico, is now cultivated
also in Spain, India, Algiers, &c. In Teneriffe
it has superseded the grape vine. The cochineal
grower must carefully avoid mixing different
species of coccus, and after a gathering his
plants must be carefully washed with a sponge
before they are strewn again with mother insects.

M. Guérin Menneville lately discovered in
the south of France, upon the bean, an
indigenous cochineal of which the colouring matter
is a peculiar scarlet, usually obtainable by none
but artificial means. It is not a carmine, and
as every true coccus yields carminium, this
newly-discovered insect is probably not a true
cochineal, but an aphis, of which the dye is said
to have decided advantages over cochineal in
dyeing wool, if it could be multiplied so as to be
cheap and abundant.

Lac, formerly supposed to be formed by the
Coccus lacca as bees form their cells, is now
said to consist of five sorts of resin mixed
with a little wax, colouring matter, and grease,
exuding from the jujube and other trees after
this coccus has pricked them. The colouring
matter being carminium— the principle of
the cochineal—that certainly is communicated
to it by the coccus. Carminium mixed with
alumina produces the magnificent lake known to
the artist as carmine; it is deposited on adding
alum to an alkaline solution of cochineal; but
it is a singular fact, that if this be done in the
dark the carmine will be far less brilliant than
if it be prepared in the sunshine. The only
rouge that can be used by actors on the stage—
or off it—without injury to health, is that
produced by a mixture of an ounce of freshly
prepared carmine with a quarter of a pound of
chalk.

We pass over the fly (cynips) that produces
gall-nuts with only a couple of notes. The gallnut,
however large, attains its full size in a day or
two, and it is remarkable that the grub in it,
surrounded by a vegetable tumour that contains
no particle of grease or oily matter, becomes
distinguished for its fat. It turns the starch or
other vegetable matter on which it feeds into
fat in a way that deserves the observation of
Mr. Banting; for, says Dr. Phipson, "the
conditions under which fat is most readily
formed are indeed those in which the larvæ of
the cynips live, namely, a vegetable or
farinaceous diet, repose, solitude, and obscurity."

An aphis in some parts of Asia produces
galls that are used as a crimson dye for silk; a
yellow dye seems to be procurable from the gall-
nut formed at the extremities of the spruce fir
by the aphis pini; and the best yellow of India
is produced from a sort of gall.

There is a Chinese coccus that produces from
the trees it inhabits tumours as large as a walnut,
of a wax-like spermaceti. It begins to
appear about June, and is gathered at the
beginning of September. In China alone (where
it is chiefly cultivated in the province of
Xantung) this insect thus produces wax enough
for the wants of the whole nation. It is reared
also from the frontiers of Thibet to the Pacific
Ocean. France pays four millions of francs a
year for wax. This coccus alone produces in a
year wax to the value of ten millions of francs,
so that we do not now depend, as we used to
depend, wholly on the wax of bees.

As to the bees and their wax they do not
obtain it at all—as they do their honey—from
the vegetable world, but secrete it themselves
in thin plates, from special organs on each side
of the abdomen. There is a wild bee of Ceylon
that, though it makes much honey, is itself
barbarously eaten as a delicacy. Elsewhere all the
world over the bee is honoured as a liberal friend
of man. In the Ukraine some of the peasants
make more profit from their bees than from
their corn. There are varieties of honey yielded
by varieties of bee, and there are varieties of
honey yielded by our own familiar honey-bee,
who suits his taste to his country, and in the
Highlands of Scotland prefers gathering honey
from the heather, in Scania from the buckwheat,
in Poland from the lime-trees, in Corsica from
the arbutus, in Narbonne from the rosemary,
and in Greece from the thyme.

It is no longer thought necessary to kill bees
to get at their honey. They may be "chloroformed"
by the smoke of the puff-ball fungus;
but Mr. Nutt's system of hive makes even this
unnecessary. Great care and attention is necessary
to successful bee-keeping. Near Paris the
average clear profit from each beehive varies
from ten shillings to a pound a year. The chief
losses occur in the winter. M. Antoine of
Rheims has lately been teaching that the best
way to winter the hives is to bury them, with the
utmost care and with the least possible motion
and noise, in a pretty deep trench dug about the
middle of November, their sides protected with