THE TENTHREDO LUCORUM. 179 
and attains the length of an inch without reckoning the ovipositor, 
which is half an inch long. This long instrument is used to 
perforate the bark of fir trees, and the larva finds itself in the 
midst of its food. 
The genus contains species that have been called by the 
name of Uvocera; and they have, of late years, excited no 
small astonishment in the minds of many military men, for some 
of these insects took a fancy to eat lead and gnaw bullets. Mar- 
shal Vaillant, a Russian colonel, M. Motschulsky, and the director 
of the museum at Vienna, M. Kollar, have asserted and proved 
that the leaden bullets made for the French army during the 
Crimean war were riddled by Szrer juvencus. These insects 
certainly got out of the boxes, in the wood of which—green 
when they were made—the larve were included; and they were 
found in the middle of the bullets, gnawing away, and perforating 
the lead with their strong mandibles. 
Oryssus coronatus is one of the Szric7de, and the female has 
a thin saw, which is folded underneath the abdomen; but, unfor- 
tunately, its metamorphoses are unknown. 
There is a remarkable saw-fly (Zenthredo Lucorum) which lays 
its eggs in the hawthorn trees soon after they have pushed forth 
their tenderest leaves. It is a large fly, and is of a dusky-brown 
colour, and about the size of a wasp. The female has a small and 
very thin laying apparatus, and she chooses the upper surface of a 
leaf, and pokes the edge of the ovipositor just under the cuticle ; she 
then moves the saws gently, and expands them, moving them side- 
ways. As the saws are drawn out of this most delicate wound, an 
egg is left in their place, and gummed in by a viscid secretion. The 
female lays several eggs, and they are pale and small. After a 
while, the leaf grows, and is well nourished with the juices of the 
plant ; and the eggs grow also, being close to the respiratory organs 
of the leaf, and in the midst of the nutritious fluids. The larva 
can be seen in the egg, curled up, and turning over and over, 
after the manner of all embryos. It is hatched after a while, and 
it crawls upon and devours the leaf. The thorns suffer a great 
deal from it, and were it not for a fellow hymenopterous insect 
that lays its eggs in the larva, they would have much more 
damage done to them. When the larva has attained its full 
M 2 
