BUFONIA, a section of the 2d sub-class of reptiles, Batrachia, and order Batrachia salienta. The section Bufonia includes the families Rhino dermatidee and Bufonidie. Bufo scabra, the Bengal and Java toad, abounds in the marshes in the Lachen valley, adjoining Tibet. This is a remarkable instance of wide geographical distri bution for a batrachian, which is common at the level of the sea under the tropics.—Hooker, Jour.
BUG, an insect belonging to the family Hemi ptera, several genera of which occur in India. Amongst others are Cantuo ocellatus, Leptoscelis marginalis, Callidea Stockerius, etc. etc. Of the aquatic species, the gigantic Belostoma Indicum attains a size of nearly three inches. Some of them are most attractive in colour ; a green one is often seen on leaves, and is quite inoffensive if unmolested, but if irritated exhales an offensive odour.—Tennent's Ceylon.
BUG. Insects known as coffee bugs have, in recent years, occasioned anxiety and losses to the coffee planters. In Ceylon, the first regularly worked estate was opened in 1825, but the bug does not seem to have appeared in large quantities till 1845, when, however, it began to spread with such rapidity, that in 1847 a very general alarm was taken by the planters, about the same time that the potato, vine, and olive diseases began to create alarm in Europe. The coffee bug seems, however, to bo indigenous in Ceylon, for the white bug has been found on orange, guava, and other trees, as also on beet-root and other vege tables, and the brown bun attacks the guava, hibiscus, Ixora, Justicia, and orange trees—indeed, every plant and tree, and even the weeds, on a coffee estate, particularly such as are in gardens.
When a coffee tree is attacked by the bug, it is deprived of its sap and its nourishment, whilst the fungus, which never fails to attend on the bug, prevents restoration by closing the stomates through which the tree breathes and respires. Bug, Mr. Nietner tells us, existed on the estates to an incalculable extent; none were believed to be quite free from it. Whole estates are seen black with bugs, i.e. with the fungus; and he asks, Am I wrong in saying that if there was no bug in Ceylon, it would at a rough guess produce 50,000 cwts. of coffee more than it actually does?' The value of this quantity on the spot being about £125,000, this sum represents the aggregate of the annual loss by bug sustained by the Ceylon planters.
Mr. Nietner's observations had been more par ticularly confined to the group of districts around Peacock Hill, but his list of the enemies of the coffee tree holds good in general for the entire coffee region of Ceylon. He tells us, however, that the brown and white bug and the black and white grub are the only universal and im portant enemies of the coffee tree, and that the destruction caused by Arhines, Limacodes, Zeuzera, Phymatea, Strachia, and the coffee rat, appear to be of a more local and occasional nature, and are therefore of less importance. There are three pests which are chief,—the white bug, the brown bug, and the black bug.
The appearance and disappearance of the coffee bug, he tells us, is most capricious. It comes and goes,—now rapidly spreading over a whole estate, now confining itself to a single tree amongst thousands ; here leaving an estate in the course of a twelvemonth, there remaining permanently. Sometimes spreading over a whole estate, some times attacking a single field, then leaving it for another and another. But the white bug prefers dry, and tho brown, damp localities, the latter being found more plentiful in close ravines and amongst heavy rotting timbers than on open hill sides, and it is probably to this predilection that the shifting of the insect is attributable. The bug of course seeks out the softest and most sheltered parts of the tree, the young shoots, the under sides of the leaves, and the clusters of berries. The injury done by the white bug seems more severe than that from the brown, but, not being so plentiful as the latter, it is of less general import ance. The white bug is especially fond of con gregating amongst the clusters of berries, which drop off from the injury they receive, and trees often lose their entire crop in this manner. The injury produced by the brown bug is the weaken ing of the tree, and is thus more general, but the crop does not drop off altogether nor so suddenly. With white bugs on an estate, the crop can hardly be estimated ; with brown bugs it can.