Holmesdale Natural History Club. 45 



the breeding of the goldea eagle it seems that it occupies about five months 

 of each year. If a new nest is to be built it is begun early in March, the 

 eggs are laid about the last week in March or first in April, the young 

 birds are hatched about the end of April, and are not ready to leave the 

 nest till the beginning of August. They thus seem to take about three 

 months in attaining their full size. Our guide afterwards showed us another 

 nest at the lower end of the valley, which was, however, a good deal 

 destroyed. It had been built about four years, and was occupied two years 

 before we saw it ; it was in a position perfectlj' easy of access, on a good 

 broad ledge or shelf of rock quite covered above. I think there is every 

 reason to suppose that all the three eyries in this glen belonged to the same 

 pair of birds. It is said by some that golden eagles almost always select 

 the southern or shady side of the valley for their nests, preferring a site 

 where they get little or no sun. How this may be I do not know, but cer- 

 tainly all the nests I have mentioned are placed on the shady side of the 

 crag or valley, and I think that a sunbeam can seldom or never fall on any 

 of the four eyries that I have actually visited. 



Sir Sidney Saunders delivered an address on " Fig Insects," explaining in 

 the first instance that those whose life historj'' he was about to narrate wef e 

 not found in the domestic figs, but in those of various descriptions of Ficus 

 in the wild state, subsisting on the seeds wherein their eggs were laid, 

 and non-parasitic in their habits. Linnaeus considered them to belong to 

 the vegetable feeding Cynipidie, but others have placed them among the 

 parasitic tribe of Chalcididre, wliose mode of life essentially diHers from 

 theirs. Some of these fig insects have long been utilised by fig growers in 

 the Levant for the process of Caprijication, as adverted to by ancient 

 writers, Pliny, Plutarch, and others ; an operation still practised in modern 

 times, which is deemed essential to promote the ripening of the domestic 

 tigs and prevent them from prematurely falling off the tree. This 

 expedient consists in attaching to the cultivated fig trees bunches of the 

 wild figs of Ficus caprifica or F. Carica3 at the time when these insects are 

 ready to emerge therefrom, and when the domestic figs arc in a less forward 

 state, whereby the pollen of the one may be conveyed to the other, as 

 suggested by Linuajus and Latreille (Hist. Nat. tom. xiii., p. 204.) But 

 different explanations have been propounded by other writers, all having 

 assumed as a matter of fact that these insects actually penetrate within the 

 domestic fig, of which, however, no evidence is extant. Pontedera had 

 noticed these insects before Linnajus, as quoted by the latter (Anthol. 2, 

 p. 172, Tab. xi.), having obtained them from the seed vessels of the wild figs. 

 Tournefort also in his " Voyage au Levant," and in a memoire to the 

 Academic des Sciences at Paris in 1705, enters fully into the system of 

 caprification, without explaining how the influence of these insects was 

 supposed to operate, simply aflirming that otherwise the domestic figs not 

 ripening, would fall, and the cultivators lose their crops. Another French 

 writer, M. Bernard, declare i that he could never find any of these insects 

 in the cultivated figs ; while remarking that even supposing them to force 



