CYNIPID^ — GALL-FLIEF. 143 



Cynipidse — Gall-flies. 



In the spring of 1694, some Galls hung down like chains 

 upon the oaks in Germany, and the common people, who 

 had never observed them before, imagined them to be mag- 

 ical knots. ^ 



A very old and common superstition is, that every oak- 

 apple contains either a maggot, a fly, or a spider: the first 

 foretelling famine, the second war, and the third, the spider, 

 pestilence. Matthiolus gravely affirms this conceit to be 

 true ;^ and the learned Sir Thomas Browne, in his Pseudo- 

 doxia Epidemica, has thought it worth his while, with much 

 gravity, to explode it. He, however, while combating one 

 popular error, falls himself into another, for want of that 

 philosophical knowledge of insects which later times have 

 succeeded in obtaining. We pass this by, and hurry to his 

 conclusion : "We confess the opinion may hold some verity 

 in analogy, or emblematical phancy; for pestilence is pro- 

 perly signified by the spider, whereof some kinds are of a 

 very venomous nature : famine by maggots, which destroy 

 the fruits of the earth ; and war not improperly by the fly, if 

 we rest in the phancy of Homer, who compares the valiant 

 Grecian unto a fly. Some verity it may also have in itself, as 

 truly declaring the corruptive constitution in the present 

 sap and nutrimental juice of the tree ; and may conse- 

 quently discover the disposition of the year according to 

 the plenty or kinds of those productions; for if the putrefy- 

 ing juices of bodies bring forth plenty of flies and maggots, 

 they give forth testimony of common corruption, and declare 

 that the elements are full of the seeds of putrefaction, as the 

 great number of caterpillars, gnats, and ordinary insects do 

 also declare. If they run into spiders, they give signs of 

 higher putrefaction, as plenty of vipers and scorpions are 

 confessed to do ; the putrefying materials producing ani- 

 mals of higher mischief according to the advance and higher 

 strain of corruption."^ 



1 They were produced by that species of Gall-fly, Cynips, de- 

 lineated by Reaumur in his Hist, of Ins., vol. iii. tabl. 4U. The 

 Mirror, xxx. 234. 



2 K. and S. Introd., i. 33. 



3 Browne's Works, ii. 376. 



