400 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 
species of Cynips, called Cynips Psenes, and although the 
soundness of this view has been disputed by a most distin- 
guished traveller and observer, Hasselquist, and also by one 
of our most learned entomologists, Olivier, still the pheno- 
menon of caprification and its accelerations, through the 
instrumentality of insects, are matters of current faith. It is 
said that the Cynips is induced, by the earlier ripening of the 
wild fig, Ficus terragena, to prefer these as a nidus for its 
eggs, and that the larve produced therefrom, having thus 
become denizens of these figs, go through their metamor- 
phoses earlier than they would have done in the cultivated 
species, and when ready to emerge they become covered with 
pollen, which they carry with them wherever they go. The 
cultivators, taking advantage of this propensity, gather the 
wild figs, and place them near the cultivated ones; and the 
pollen-covered insects have thus the opportunity of conveying 
the fertilizing element to the latter. “Such is the account of 
the process given by some authors; but Lindley (‘ Penny 
Cyclop.’ vi. 273), DeCandolle (‘ Physiol. Végét.’ p. 580), 
Treviranus (in ‘ Linnea,’ 1825, with figures of the insect), and 
other vegetable physiologists, attribute the earlier ripening of 
the otherwise later crop, and the opportunity thus afforded to 
the fig-growers of the Levant of obtaining a double crop in 
a season, to the well-known fact, that fruit bitten by insects 
ripens sooner than others; the wound, and not the act of 
impregnation, appearing to act as a stimulant to the local 
action of the parenchyma.” (‘ Westwood Introduction,’ vol. il. 
165.) This brief but comprehensive summary of the opinion 
of these learned naturalists, by removing one difficulty rather 
tends to introduce another, for it assumes that the Cynipide, 
in their perfect state, are vegetable-feeders, an assumption 
which the discoveries of Dr. Coquerel, as cited below by Mr. 
Walker, seem to support. Mr. Walker places the strange 
creatures, of which he has most obligingly lent me the 
carefully-finished figures, in the family Agaonide. This 
family forms part of the section Chalcidiz, on which he is 
issuing a work in small fasciculi, four of which have already 
appeared. His observations on the Agaonide are as follows: 
—“The Agaonidz appear as yet chiefly in three different 
aspects, and in three different regions. ‘The first region is 
the Mauritius, where they have been discovered by the 
