250 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 



Entomologist,' as already incidentally noticed in this journal. 

 More recently Mr. H. F. Bassett — a most careful observer — 

 slates, at p. 91 of the fifth volume of the 'Canadian Entomolo- 

 gist,' that " Cynips quercus-operator, an American species, is 

 double-brooded, one brood of females ovipositing in the buds 

 of the oak, and again some of a second brood ovipositing in the 

 young acorns of Quercus ilicifolia. From these and other facts 

 he infers that all the American species, that are found only in 

 the female sex, are represented in another generation by both 

 sexes, and that the two broods are, owing to seasonal differ- 

 ences, produced from galls that are entirely distinct from each 

 other." Whether this is only an ingenious conjecture, or an 

 absolute discovery, 1 am unable to say; if the latter it may 

 (in the hands of such painstaking men as Mr. Inchbald, 

 Mr. Smith, Mr. Parfitt, Mr. Marshall, and Mr. Fitch) supply 

 a clew to the eventual discovery of the males of Cynips 

 Lignicola. In the meantime the weight of evidence is thrown 

 into the other scale. I know not when or where the state- 

 ment originated, but I find myself in 1835, in the ' Grammar 

 of Entomology,' describing the female Cynips (p. 210), as 

 though a male had never been seen or thought of; and again, 

 in my little pamphlet on the ' Physiological Classification 

 of Animals,' I have plainly stated that no male is known. 

 In 1861 Mr. F. Smith, of the British Museum, sent me a 

 paper on the subject, which, so far as negative evidence can 

 go, seems completely to decide the question as to the non- 

 existence of a male in Cynips Lignicola. I will cite portions of 

 this paper: — "In the year 1857 I felt desirous of satisfying 

 myself as far as possible, by my own observations, of the 

 truth of the opinion at that time put forth by more than 

 one eminent entomologist, that in the genus Cynips there is 

 only one form of sex ; in other words, that in the genus 

 Cynips there is no male. In order to carry out my experi- 

 ments I obtained from Devonshire a large supply of the galls 

 of C. Lignicola, somewhere about a bushel and a half: every 

 gall was tenanted by the Cynips or its parasite, Callimome 

 Devoniensis. About the beginning of April, 1858, the Cynips 

 began to issue from the galls, and continued to do so up to 

 the end of May, at which time 1 could not have obtained less 

 than twelve thousand examples, and many hundreds of its 

 parasite. By examining the galls daily during the progress 



