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There are no Courts to convict her of the dreadful deed. She stands 

 in no awe of fine, or imprisonment, or capital punishment. Yet never 

 was such an unnatural act witnessed by the eye of mortal entomolo- 

 gist. With grave and solemn deliberation she turns her body slowly 

 round, deposits the egg as well as may be in the excavation already 

 prepared for it, and finally, turning round once more, re-adjusts it 

 with her snout, till it is completely embedded in its destined recep- 

 tacle, with its outer surface slightly below the general level of the 

 skin of the plum, and its inner surface overhanging a cavity twice or 

 thrice as large as itself. 



"But,^' the reader may perhaps, ask, "what is the use of this 

 cavity? Why not bore a hole just about the size of the egg, and then 

 at once slip the egg into it ?" My friend ! the mother Plum Gouger 

 knows better than that ! Providence has taught her that the plum, 

 in which she is about to lay her egg, is a growing and living organism, 

 and she has learned as thoroughly as the most experienced human 

 botanist, that any wound that she may produce in it will be speedily 

 healed and filled up by the reparative powers of nature. Providence 

 •taught her, too, long before human physiologists discovered this won- 

 derful process of "endosmosis," as it is called, that an egg, full of 

 thick, viscid matter and with a delicate membranous shell, when im- 

 mersed among the thin sap of the green plum, will necessarily absorb 

 a good deal of that sap, and thus increase considerably in size. She 

 therefore allows full scope and to spare, both for the natural growth 

 of the egg and for the natural growth of the plum. For she is well 

 aware that the slightest pressure will rupture the delicate" membrane, 

 within which sleeps the microscopically minute embryo of the future 

 Plum Gouger. And she is well aware, too, that it will be several 

 days, at the least, before the seemingly inanimate egg will disclose 

 the little larva, that will thereafter be abundantly able to fight 

 the rest of his way, with his own good, strong jaws, through 

 this sublunary world. — With all his acquired experience, and all his 

 theoretical knowledge, and all his boasted reasoning powers, could a 

 human workman have provided with more exquisite simplicity for 

 the important object which was to be attained? 



Whenever either a male or a female Plum Gouger desires to feed 

 on the fiesh of the Plum, they proceed precisely in the same way as the 

 female does, when she excavates in the manner already described a 

 receptacle for an egg. A plum, studded all over with these tiny holes, 

 looks just as if somebody had been puncturing it with a common pin 

 heated red hot. About the latter end of June, I shut up two Plum 

 Gougers, which I had captured at large, in a glass vessel, along with 



