OTHER HEN-LIKE INSECTS. 93 



The field-bug, also, we are told, conducts her large family 

 of thirty or forty, as a hen her chickens. She never leaves 

 them, and as soon as she begins to move, all the little ones 

 closely follow, assembling, whenever she stops, in a cluster 

 round her. De Geer, having cut off a branch of birch (a tree 

 she inhabits) with one of these families, the mother showed 

 every symptom of uneasiness : instead of immediate flight she 

 never stirred from her young, but kept beating her wings in- 

 cessantly and rapidly, for the purpose, evidently, of protecting 

 them from danger. 



The egg-bearing water-scorpion displays even more attach- 

 ment for her eggs than birds, for she never leaves them until 

 hatched, carrying them always in a cluster on her back. The 

 cochineal insects, of which one species affords the well-known 

 dye, protect their eggs by covering them with their own life- 

 less bodies. Some of these little animals, with their eggs thus 

 curiously guarded, and imbedded in a white cottony secre- 

 tion, are to be found on grape-vines, too commonly for the 

 gardener, especially near London. The hawthorn furnishes, in 

 another coccus, another instance of frequent occurrence, in 

 which the body of the mother insect, dried to a silvery grey 

 skin, is to be seen protecting from winter's cold a multitude of 

 her orange-coloured eggs. 



The two habitudes last named, bear, certainly, most of the 

 instinctive character, but at all events they are poetic in idea. 

 Perhaps, however, none of the maternal traits above noted are 



