158 ORIGIN OF GALLS. 



East, the very region of romance. With graver pens than ours, 

 Fancies would seem, indeed, to have been the very growth of 

 Galls ; for, descanting on their origin, an Italian entomologist, 1 

 an observant naturalist, one who waged war, moreover, with 

 Popular Fallacies, imagined that Oak-apples and other Galls 

 were animated, nay, brought into being by a soul not an 

 animal but a vegetative and sensitive soul in the plant itself. 

 To account for the mysterious entrance of life into the centre 

 of an imperforate ball, he might just as well have adopted, and 

 slightly modified to suit his purpose, the no less imaginative 

 notion of some learned Jewish Rabbins, who believed, or, not 

 believing, taught that human souls transmigrate after death 

 into leaves and buds. 



But a truce with fancy, and now for fact; or perhaps we 

 should say rather for the probable instead of improbable con- 

 jectures to which the extraordinary birth of oak-galls, and galls 

 in general, have given rise. One thing is clearly ascertained, 

 namely, that their originator is none other than an insect, the 

 winged parent of the wingless grub, or Larva, which begins 

 life within them; but how the slight puncture made by the 

 mother fly upon a leaf, or stem, or bud, can produce, and that 

 often in a few hours, the extraneous vegetable products which 

 arise for its protection around the inserted egg, is still no little 

 of a marvel and a mystery. The common oak-apple (as be- 

 comes instantly apparent on cutting one across) contains within 

 its pulpy substance numerous oval cells, each enclosing a small 

 grub, which in due season, June usually, or July, will 

 issue forth a little four-winged insect, the image of its mother 

 Gall-fly. 2 Such, at least, is the result, when the legitimate 

 possessors of the apple are allowed to reach maturity ; but, in 

 spite of the protecting bulwark which Nature has thrown up 

 around them, a parasitic invader, a brilliant fly of the usurping 

 family Ichneumon? often detects the helpless dwellers in the 



1 Redi. 2 Vignette. 3 Vignette. 



