JOURNAL OF PROCEEDINGS. 
xlvii 
have quitted their galleries, and made their way out of, or through 
the paper, in search of their habitual repast. 
“ 3. In the third place, I have repeatedly found, as other ob- 
servers (including M. Audouin in his letter to me) have stated 
they have done, the females lying dead at the further end of their 
galleries long after the larvae were hatched, proving that, after de- 
positing her eggs, the female had died there, — a result very pro- 
bable, if we suppose that she there found her food, but very 
unlikely to occur if hunger required her daily exit to feed on 
another tree ; as in that case, after completing her gallery and 
laying her last egg, why should she return to it ? and it would 
seem a very far-fetched supposition to assume that her vitality 
was so exactly apportioned to her store of eggs, that on laying the 
last she instantly expired, without having strength to emerge from 
her gallery in search of her food. 
“Combining these facts with another which I have ascertained as 
far as the rough dissection on a tour, and the assistance of a pocket 
lens only, would allow, namely, that but one or two full-grown 
eggs are developed and excluded daily, and that consequently one 
of the longest galleries, containing often twenty to thirty eggs on 
each side, or forty to sixty in all, must occupy the female several 
weeks in its construction and the deposition of her eggs, I have 
been led to the following conclusions as to the way in which a 
female proceeds : — I conceive that soon after her exclusion from 
the pupa, and emerging from the tree in which as a larva she has 
fed, a first union with the male takes place, and that she then com- 
mences boring into the bark to form her egg-gallery, which she 
never wholly quits, however long she may be occupied in making 
it, but eats and digests what she excavates, merely retiring back- 
wards from time to time (which she does as readily and quickly 
as she advances forward) to the entrance-hole, in order to void her 
excrement and receive the additional embraces of the male, in case, 
as seems to me likely from what I have observed, more than one 
copulation is required to impregnate the whole number of eggs, 
and that ultimately she in general dies at the end of her beloved 
gallery, in which her instinct has concentrated all her enjoyments 
— those of eating, the sexual intercourse, and the deposition of 
her eggs : and that thus, being fully and more agreeably occupied, 
she does not, as M. Audouin supposes she does, assist the male in 
eating the bark of sound trees. 
“ I need scarcely add that I attach no value whatever to this 
hypothesis, being well aware what small dependance can ever be 
