THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 261 



appearance becomes so inorganic that even the sharp, prying 

 eye of a bird would be deceived, and the delicate, discrimi- 

 nating touch of a spider would fail to detect life under this 

 mask of death. Some insects have a special provision for 

 this manoeuvre; as in those many-bladed knives which are 

 the delight of schoolboys and the terror of timid mothers, 

 each of the limbs fits with the greatest nicety into a groove 

 purposely fashioned to receive it. If you examine a pill- 

 beetle (Byrrhus), while it is shamming death in this way, you 

 will find it so compact and pill-like that you are quite unable 

 to distinguish the legs from the body until the creature 

 condescends to crawl, and thus reveal the secrets of its 

 structure. Notwithstanding this love of concealment, one or 

 other of the roving males, similarly coloured to the female, 

 but of a far more volatile disposition, is sure to find her, and 

 impregnation and maternity follow as matters of course. 

 Then she may be seen in the act of oviposition, — on a sloe- 

 leaf in the hedges, or a cherry-leaf in the garden, or a pear- 

 leaf in the orchard, — and a serious matter she makes of it. 

 So serious and so intent is she in the performance of this 

 maternal duty, that you may sometimes take her off the sloe- 

 leaf between your finger and thumb. She will evince no 

 disposition to fly, make no effort to run, but only resort to the 

 expedient of feigning death, — an expedient that facilitates 

 her capture rather than otherwise, especially if you hold one 

 hand beneath the leaf on which she is operating, in order to 

 arrest her fall, I need scarcely say that this insect is a 

 member of the great family of sawflies, — a family that has 

 long attracted the attention and admiration of the entomolo- 

 gist; nor need I again describe the saw with which all of 

 them seem to abrade the cuticle of the leaf, leaf-stalk, or 

 twig, on which they deposit their eggs. 



Suffice it to say that the abrasion made by the insect 

 whose bistory 1 am relating is of a slightly-curved or 

 crescentic form, and that the egg is laid in this abraded 

 portion. The denuded parenchyma of the leaf thus comes 

 into immediate contact with the under side of the egg, which 

 is of an oblong shape, and is covered with a leathery shell, 

 capable of considerable expansion as the enclosed larva 

 increases in size. Thus the egg is seen very obviously to 

 grow, — a fact familiar to entomologists, but one which 



