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Che Large Wood Wasp. 
have had several specimens of this insect brought to us the 
last year or two, with special requests to know its name, and 
whether it was English or Foreign. In answer to the former we 
said it was a Wood Wasp, and to the latter query we said ‘‘Both.” 
It is met with most commonly perhaps in grocers’ shops among 
the sugar, sometimes alive and sometimes dead; it emerges oc- 
casionally from the floor of a room, having spent a portion of its 
life in a wooden prison; but wherever it is seen it causes some 
little terror from its great size, and the length of its ovipositor. 
A short account of it may not be uninteresting to our readers. 
It belongs in the first place to that order of insects, called the 
Hymenoptera, from the fact of their possessing four transparent 
membranous wings: in this order are included the bees, wasps, 
ichneumons, sawflies, &c., from which it will be seen that the 
highest order of insect instinct is comprehended in it. In the next 
place it is included in the family Siricide, and it rejoices in the 
scientific name of Sirex gigas, the Giant Wood Wasp, Sawfly, or 
Ichneumon, It is, as we before said, a formidable looking creature, 
