2l8 THE WOODLANDS. 



pairing, the female looks out for a place where she 

 can safely deposit her eggs, from eighty to one hun- 

 dred and twenty, and where she thinks they may find 

 suitable nourishment when hatched into caterpillars. 

 This food is either the foliage of the end of the last 

 year's shoot, or that of the shoot not quite ex- 

 panded. When prepared, she makes an incision the 

 whole length of the leaf, with her ovipositor, and 

 hollows out the leaf from the edge towards the mid- 

 dle, so that one or two eggs can lie in the narrow 

 space ; the eggs are then laid in it, and closely 

 covered up with a tough, resinous material, mixed 

 with the substance scraped from the leaf. Thus she 

 proceeds until all the eggs are deposited on several 

 leaves. After from sixteen to twenty-four days the 

 caterpillars appear from the eggs, about a line long. 

 In this condition the insect is a great glutton. A 

 full-grown caterpillar requires from six to twelve 

 strong, healthy leaves daily, which it consumes from 

 the point to the sheath. According to Miiller 1 these 

 caterpillars were so numerous in 1819, in some of 

 the pine forests of Franconia, that none of the 

 foliage could be seen for them. They fell in 

 thousands from the trees, collected themselves in 

 heaps, not unfrequently of the size of a man's head, 

 and marched in dense flocks from those trees which 

 they had stripped to those that were still green. 

 According to the calculations of this writer, a pair 

 of these insects would, in ten years, if unchecked, 

 produce an offspring of nearly two hundred thousand 



1 "Card. Chron.," 1852, p. 708. 



