AFFECTION OF INSECTS FOR THEIR YOUNG. 201 



into it. 1 The Cicada, so celebrated by the poets of antiquity, which lays 

 its eggs in dry wood, requires a stronger instrument of a different construc- 

 tion. Accordingly it is provided with an excellent double auger, the sides 

 of which play alternately and parallel to each other, and bore a hole of 

 the requisite depth in very hard substances without ever being dis- 

 placed. 2 



The construction of the sting or ovipositor with which the different 

 species of Ichneumon are provided, is not less nicely adapted to its various 

 purposes. In those which lay their eggs in the bodies of caterpillars that 

 feed exposed on the leaves of plants it is short, often in very large species 

 not the eighth of an inch long : having free access to their victims, a longer 

 sting would have been useless. But a considerable number oviposit in 

 larva? which lie concealed where so short an instrument could not possibly 

 approach them. In these, therefore, the sting is proportionably elongated, 

 so much so that in some small species it is three or four times the length 

 of the body. Thus in Pimpla Manifestator, whose economy has been so 

 pleasingly illustrated hy Mr. Marsham 3 , and which attacks the larva of a 

 wild bee (Chelostoma^ maxillosa) lying at the bottom of deep holes in old 

 wood, the sting is nearly two inches long ; and it is not much shorter in 

 the more minute /. Sfrobilellte L., which lays its eggs in larva? concealed in 

 the interior of fir cones, which without such an apparatus it would never 

 be able to reach. 



The tail of the females of many moths, whose eggs require to be pro- 

 tected from too severe a cold and too strong a light, is furnished, evidently 

 for application to this very purpose, with a thick tuft of hair. But how 

 shall the moth detach this non-conducting material and arrange it upon 

 her eiigs ? Her ovipositor is provided at the end with an instrument re- 

 sembling a pair of pincers, which for this purpose are as good as hands. 

 With these, having previously deposited her eggs upon a leaf, she pulls off 

 her tuft of hairs, with which she so closely envelops them as effectually 

 to preserve them of the required temperature, and having performed this 

 last duty to her progeny she expires. 



The ovipositor of the Capricorn beetles, an infinite host, is a flattened 

 retractile tube, of a hard substance, by means of which it can introduce its 

 eggs under the bark of timber, and so place them where its progeny will 

 find their appropriate food. 5 The auger used by certain species of CEstrus, 

 to enable them to penetrate the hides of oxen or deer and form a nidus 

 for their eggs, has been before described. But to enumerate all the 

 varieties of these instruments would be endless. 



The purpose which in the insects above mentioned is answered by their 

 anal apparatus is fulfilled in the numerous tribes of weevils by the long 

 slender snout with which their head is provided. It is with this that Ea- 

 laninus Nucum pierces the shell of the nut, and the weevil (Calandra grn- 



1 Prof. Peck's Nat. Hist, of the Slug-worm, 1. 12. f. 1214. 



2 Dr. Burmeister and M. Doyfere consider the central piece of the borer of the 

 Cicada as the really piercing organ, and the lateral files as only serving as a point 

 of support ; but Mr. Westwood states that numerous dissections of these parts have 

 convinced him of the correctness of Reaumur's description, that the lateral serrated 

 pieces are the real organs of perforation. (Mod. Class, of Ins. ii. 424.) 



3 Linn. Trans, iii. 23. 4 Apis. **, c. 2. y. K. 

 5 See Kirby in Linn. Trans, v. 254. 1. 12. f. 15. 



