330 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 
stature it is; each changes to a chrysalis, and forthwith to an 
imago; it then bursts a hole in its tortoise-like covering and 
flies away, impatient to obtain its liberty. How different 
from its former self; different from its arachnoid existence ; 
different from its scale-like state,—it has now a transverse 
hammer-shaped head, with moniliform antenne and facetted 
eyes ; two ample wings which, when not in action, lie one 
over the other flat on its back; and two long bristle-like tails 
at the extremity of its abdomen protruding, far beyond the tips 
of its wings. While the males thus undergo a metamorphosis 
as complete as any recorded by Ovid, the females are 
“changeless as the eternal rocks;” they are obese and 
apparently lifeless lumps; they receive the attentions of the 
males with the most stolid indifference, and I even doubt 
whether, in the economy of nature, it is a necessity for these 
apathetic creatures to receive such attentions at all, for there 
is no such a thing among scale-insects as an infertile female. 
The female is so closely attached to the rind of the young 
shoot, the sap of which she is sucking, that it is impossible to 
remove without killing her: she gradually swells until she 
attains an immense size, when her whole body becomes 
a bag of eggs; she begins laying with her body glued down 
all round to the twig, but between her body and the rind, 
except just at the edges, is a quantity of gummy cotton 
spread over the whole space which she covers. The laying 
of eggs is on a different system to that of other insects: the 
first egg is laid in the cottony substance, without any 
disturbance to the margin of the body glued to the rind; it 
does not adhere like the eggs of many other insects, but lies 
loose in the cotton ; then another egg is laid, which pushes the 
first a little forwards; and then another, and another, none of 
them being visible from without; so that all the eggs that a 
female Coccus lays she incubates or sits on like an old 
broody hen. As the eggs increase in number they also 
increase in size, and the mass raises the ventral surface of 
her body into a manifest concavity, so that the body itself 
gets thinner and thinner, while the pile of eggs it covers 
gets thicker and thicker. At last her stock of eggs is 
exhausted; the lower or ventral skin of her body meets the 
upper or dorsal skin, and grows hard and fast against it: 
then the old lady dies, and her body,—that is to say, what 
