OAK APPLES. 61 



be worth inquiring whether they have aught within de- 

 serving notice ; or whether, as with the merry monarch's self, 

 they are to be estimated only for their outward bravery. 



Pleasant to the taste these fair fruits are not (as well we 

 know by bitter experiences of childhood) ; so not daring to 

 bite, let us pull one of them asunder, or, dividing it with a 

 knife, reveal its secrets. We now see, surrounded and bounded 

 by spongy pulp, a set of cells, each with its solitary living occu- 

 pant for whose safe keeping, and that of his fellows, this fruit- 

 like tenement was called into existence, not by the labours of 

 a trifling artificer, but by the touch of a flying fairy. The insect 

 tenants of these pulpy palaces are not unlike, in one condition 

 of their being, to the scions of royal houses. It is not 

 improbable that before one of them has attained to the majority 

 of its winged estate, all may be despoiled of their inheritance 

 by a host of usurping parasites, such as, in palaces reared by 

 hands, have often enacted a resembling part. 



The above description of a common oak-apple, its Gall-fly 

 occupant, and Ichneumon intruder, may seem over-fanciful -, 

 but in writing of Galls, our pen may possibly be carried from 

 the dry land of simple fact by some spirit of fiction in our ink, 

 an infusion, it is likely, of gall-nuts, the produce of the 

 East, the very region of romance. With graver pens than ours, 

 Fancies would seem, indeed, to have been the very growth of 

 Galls ; for, descanting on their origin, an Italian entomologist,^ 



* Redi. 



