XYl 
have as yet been found only in the female sex, will be found to be double- 
brooded species, one of which will be exclusively female and the other male 
and female. 
" T have two or three years tried to raise a colony of C. q. -punctata, 
Bassett, by placing the large polythalamous galls on uninfected trees just as 
the insects were ready to escape. So far I have failed to rear any galls of this 
species. Now if these females really reproduce the same kind of gall 
I ought to have succeeded, for I colonized several hundred individuals on a 
single small tree, and many more on other trees in different seasons. Of 
course the inference to be drawn from the failure of my attempt to raise 
these galls has no scientific value, but had I succeeded in raising the galls 
the fact would have been received as satisfactory proof that these female 
flies could produce generation after generation of females without the aid of 
the male element. 
" I take the ground that the reproduction of gall-insects without the inter- 
vention of the male is limited to a very few, if not even to one generation ; 
and that all our unisexual species are dimorphic forms of double-gendered 
species. I wish yourself and all others interested in working out the 
singular history of this family would give attention to these points. 
And may I ask you to inform me if anything has been written within a 
year or two that throws any light upon them, as I am aware that my non- 
intercourse with the entomologic world for a year or two past has left me 
far behind possibly on this very point. 
" I was able last spring to settle, to my own satisfaction at least, a question 
raised by myself in the first article I published on the Cynipidae, — the ques- 
tion whether the woolly galls, C. q.-seminator, Harris, and C. q.-operator, 
Osten-Sacken, were or were not abnormally developed leaves. I took the 
ground that they were, that the eggs were deposited in the oak-bud, that 
the small seed-like gall was only a modified leaf-stem and blade, and that the 
wool was only an enormous development of the pubescence always present on 
the young leaves. Mr. B. D. Walsh opposed this idea, and, either in a pub- 
lished paper or in a letter to me, denied that the gall had any connexion 
whatever with the bud or leaves. Last spring I was so fortunate as to find 
two galls of C. q.-seminator in their earliest stage, and was able to watch 
them in their development. They are really developed from buds, and are, 
as T supposed, only modified leaves. The smooth shining cell or gall is the 
petiole of the leaf, and the tuft of long woolly hairs that terminates the cell 
is only the enormous development of the leaf's pubescence." 
Xew Part of ' Transactions.' 
Part I. of the ' Transactions' for 1873 was on the table. 
AFk iiO i6i4 
