180 INSIDIOUS MURDERERS. 



wings and black-shining body glittering in the sun, is fearfully 

 vibrating her tail-like piercer, with intent to plunge it into the 

 fleshy back of her well-fed victim. She stoops her weapon 

 enters is withdrawn and leaves behind it, in the wound, a 

 germ of nascent torture a thousand times more dreadful than a 

 drop of deadly poison a tiny egg deposited within the warm 

 orifice pierced for its reception. In a few hours this egg be- 

 comes a gnawing worm, which thrives and fattens on the vital 

 juices, leaving carefully untouched the vital organs of the hap- 

 less gormandiser, thus compelled to foster it. Its growth com- 

 pleted, the parasitic grub emerges, and then, in completion of 

 its murderous part, spins a silken thread, with which it pro- 

 ceeds to bind the nearly exhausted body of its supporter to the 

 surface of the oak-leaf. Thus manacled, the shrunken remnant 

 of the once plump-crawler exists yet a few miserable days, 

 while the young Ichneumon, having enclosed itself within a 

 shroud of silk, undergoes its transformations, and finally emerges 

 into perfect life, a sparkling fly, like its parent, close beside the 

 then dead body of the creature by which it had been nourished 

 to maturity. 



In the above general picture of an oak tree city, and its 

 occupants, we have taken the license of the dramatist and 

 painter to group together several insect personages, which are 

 not likely to be seen assembled under the sun of a single sum- 

 mer's day, though all are almost certain to be found in the course 

 of a summer excepting the social Hammock Weavers, who 

 only occupy their abodes from autumn to spring. 



A single oak-bough will often present to our view an 

 universe of insect worlds in the numerous galls on leaf, stem, 

 arid catkin, differing in size and form, but all produced (as we 

 have seen already) by the puncture of a little fly. 



Even the acorn has its peculiar and appropriate insect ; each 

 lichen, moss, and fungus oak derived swarms with its insect 

 denizens; while the oak-supported ivy is the grand resort, 



