NUTS. 271 



of the nuts it thrives best by itself. The fruit should not 

 be gathered until fully ripe and brown, quite late in the 

 autumn, when they can be preserved for some months by 

 keeping them on dry floors or in sand, the fruiterers re- 

 storing their colour, when the husks become dingy, by 

 fumigating them with sulphur. They cannot, however, 

 stop the ravages of one enemy, who has been beforehand 

 with them. " Bah ! a bad one ! " exclaims many an un- 

 lucky nut-seeker, hastily dropping the shells, as, instead 

 of the delicate kernel he had expected, a soft, fat, white 

 maggot rolls wriggling on the dessert-plate. The plump 

 fellow was deposited here by his mother in the form of a 

 single tiny egg, while the nut was so young and tender 

 that the wound soon healed, and the hole by which he 

 had entered became invisible. In about a fortnight he 

 emerged from the egg, and began to exercise his appetite 

 on the soft lining of the nut-shell; then with jaws grown 

 stronger attacked the kernel ; and had his abode been left 

 undisturbed until that was all dispatched, would by that 

 time have acquired sufficient strength to gnaw a little 

 hole through its hard shell, then, contracting as much as 

 his luxurious living would allow, would have squeezed 

 through this narrow portal and let himself out. leaving 

 his late home filled with the black powder of his excre- 

 mentitious matter. Having no feet wherewith to support 

 himself (for what should he have done with such appen- 

 dages when he had no room to travel, and nothing to do 

 but to eat ?) he would have fallen at once to the ground, 

 where, having already eaten enough to last for the rest 

 of his life, he would merely burrow a cell in the earth, 

 change into a pupa, and then soon after assume his final 

 and handsomest form, that of a brown beetle about i in. 

 long, and characterized by a long slender black beak with 

 a pair of elbowed antennae inserted near the middle, so 

 that the insect looks as though it had half swallowed 

 Britannia's trident, leaving the forked end sticking out 

 of its mouth. Such, when successful in life, is the bio- 

 graphy of a Balaninus nucum. 



But could the intruding fialaninus and its progeny be 

 banished for ever from the Filbert, the claims of that nut 



