26 CURIOSITIES OF ENTOMOLOGY. 



and rolled leaves I had observed ; and great was my joy when 

 from these pages of nature's own book I first learnt the 

 mysteries of the microscopic moths. Every folded leaf is in 

 truth the habitation of the larva of a minute Lepidoptera, 

 and beneath the leaf a blotch, a pucker, or a tiny tent, will, if 

 watched, produce one of these beautiful objects. Scientifically 

 they are divided into leaf-miners, leaf-rollers, tent-makers, 

 and burrowers in the stems of the plant whereon they feed. 

 Not all leaf-miners produce Lepidoptera, for several of the 

 Diptera begin life in the same way. The primrose, whose 

 leaves are often covered with irregular, fantastic markings, 

 feeds the larv?e of a small, striped, greyish black fly with 

 yellow legs {PJujtomyza primula). The thistle is mined by a 

 yelloAV and black fly {Fhijtorwjza sonchi). The turnip and pea 

 by the little yellow Brasophila. The plantain, ranunculus, 

 stellaria, lychnis, chenopodium, and silene, are all mined by 

 Phytomyzides. The iris, verbascum, euphorbia, by Agromyzides, 

 very minute black or black and yellow flies, some of them 

 with bright red eyes, but so small as to be really microscopic ; 

 not one line in expansion, yet sad devastators in the garden 

 are they." 



But the larva of a Diptera may always be distinguished 

 from that of the Lepidoptera, at least under the microscope, 

 by the absence of feet in the dipterous larva, and the presence, 

 however minute or rudimentary, of these organs in the lepi- 

 dopterous larva. Sometimes, it is true, the undeveloped 

 condition of the true legs, and the absence in all leaf-miners 

 of the coronet of hooks upon the pro-legs, or membranous 

 feet on the hinder segments of the body, may cause a doubt, 

 as it did in the mind of the great naturalist De Geer, when 

 on finding the rose-leaf miner and examining the larvae, he 

 ^vrote: — "After examining their figure and the conformation 

 of some of their parts, one would only take them to be vers 

 or dipterous larvae, because they have eighteen legs, all mem- 

 branous and alike in form, exactly like the legs of Fausses- 

 chenilles, or larxm of saw-flies ; that is to say, without the 

 coronet of hooks which distinguishes the true caterpillars. I 

 thought therefore at first that these were a new species of 



