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Poverty Bay Standard, Volume I, Issue 88, 17 September 1873, Page 3

An attempt, it will be seen, has been made to shelve the Provincial Loans Bill on its third reading. However, 50 as against 22, affirmed to the contrary.

The cost of messages on the proposed cab'e between Australia and New Zealand is to be 15s for the first 20 words, and 9d for every additional word. Eider as a Preventive of Insect Blight.— We have met with no record of the first application of the leaves of the common elder to this purpose, but at the 131 th page of the Annual Reflisler for 1873 is a letter from Mr. Christopher Gullet, of Tavistock, Devon, to a member of the Royal Society, in which the writer details his experience in use of elder as a preventive of the attacks of insects upon various forms of vegetation. Mr. Gullet had observed how very “ offensive to our olfactory nerves was the effluvia emitted by a brush of green elder leaves,” and, reasoning thence, considered “ how much more so they must be to those of a butterfly, whom I considered as being so much superior to us in delicacy as inferior in size.” Accordingly he took some twigs of young elder, and with those whipped the cabbage plants well, but so gently as not to hurt them just as the butterflies first appeared, from which time the butterflies would never pitch on them, although they would hover around and over the bed, and although an adjoining bed not so treated was infested as usual. A plum tree against the wall being attacked by aphides, the limbs as high up as he could reach were also whipped in the same way, and with the same effect, but the leaves on the other part of the tree, “ not 6in., higher, and from thence upwards, were blighted, shrivelled up, and full of worms. Some of these I afterwards restored by whipping with and tying up elder amongst them.” Mr. Gullet concluded from these experiments that if an infusion of elder leaves were made in a tub and applied by means of a garden engine at intervals during the season when such insect blights are prevalent, it would effectually answer every purpose, without risk of injury to the blossom or fruit. Branches of elder were also successfully drawn over wheat crops about to blossom, with a view to prevent the attack of the small fly which was said to cause “ yellows ” in wheat by depositing its eggs in the ears. Crops of turnips were also saved from the fly by the same expedient; moreover, about eight or nine years previously, the country was so infested with “ cockchaffers or oak-webs, that in many parishes they eat every green thing but elder.” Mr. Gullet suggests —“ Whether the elder, now deemed noxious and offensive, may not be one day seen planted with, and entwisting its branches amongst fruit trees, in order to preserve the fruit from destruction of insects, and whether the same means which produced these several effects may not be extended to a great variety of cases in the preservation of the vegetable kingdom.” The application of an infusion of elder leaves by means of a garden engine was a common preventive and remedy for attacks of aphides on plum and cherry trees growing upon walls in England some 30 or 40 years ago, and may possibly still be so. Old remedies are removed from time to time, and possibly this mention of Mr. Gullet’s experiments, first made known a century ago, may lead to a renewal of the use for elder for some of the purposes he has indicated.