REMEDY FOR PESTS
Is not the remedy for many evils to be found by allowing one destructive force to overcome another? God so makes “the wrath of man to praise him.”
One day a very small orange-tree was taken out of the ground in Australia and sent with many others across the ocean to California. On this small tree there were a few white insects. The little tree was planted again in California and soon put out many fresh, fragrant leaves. The white insects were astonished and rejoiced that day after day went by without the appearance of any red beetles. The white insects increased in numbers; there were thousands of fragrant-leaved orange-trees in California, and in a few years there were millions of white insects in them. One morning a man stood among the trees and said, “Confound these bugs; they’ll ruin me; what shall I do?” and a man who knew said, “Get some red beetles from Australia.” So this orange-grower, with some others, paid a man to go to Australia and collect some live red beetles. The collector went across the ocean, three weeks’ steady steaming, and sent back a few of the voracious little beetles in a pill-box. They were put into a tree in a California orange-orchard in which there were many cottony-cushion scale insects. The red insects promptly began eating the white ones; and their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren have kept up this eating ever since. And so the orange-growers never tire of telling how the red beetles (whose name is Vedalia) were brought from Australia to save them from ruin by the white insects (whose name is Icerya).—Vernon L. Kellogg, “Insect Stories.”
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Remembering—See [Forgetting and Remembering].
Remembering the Good—See [Old Year Memories].
REMINDER, SEVERE
The Burgundians in France, in a statute now eleven hundred years old, attributed valor to the east of France because it had a law that the children should be taken to the limits of the district, and there soundly whipt, in order that they might forever remember the boundary-line.—Wendell Phillips.
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REMINDERS