248 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 
large trees, and it is well known that it is only the large—I 
may call them mature—trees that produce acorns, so the 
injury done to them cannot be great. As regards the species 
of this Cynips it is certainly not the C. Quercus-folii of 
Linneus; though the figure of the perfect insect, given by 
J. Remur in the ‘Genera Insectorum Linnei et Fabricii,’ 
agrees pretty well, the description does not agree at all with 
our insect.” (Zool. 5074.) 
There is a phase of the subject which would demand a 
detailed investigation here, had I not so recently urged my 
views on the readers both of the ‘ Entomologist’ (vol. vi. 
p. 275) and ‘ Field’ newspaper. There is a constant struggle 
going on between the oak and the Cynips, the aim of the oak 
being to reproduce its kind by seed, the aim of the Cynips to 
utilize the oak as a nidus and a provision for its progeny ; but 
oak-timber or oak-leaf in a normal, natural or healthy state, is 
not precisely the provision that the infant gall-fly would require, 
so the parent punctures the oak, its rind, or its leaf, or its 
leaf-stalk, or its flower, and injects a sap-poison, which totally 
alters the condition and qualities of the sap: this in sufficient 
abundance would kill the oak; but when we glance at the 
comparative magnitude of the oak and its enemy, we see that 
such a result is improbable; still the effect is deleterious: the 
oak struggles against it, and strives to perfect its normal 
produce; the Cynips also struggles to maintain its ground: 
each holds its own, and neither, during its brief historical 
existence, has gained any advantage over the other; and so 
the contest ends in a compromise. These galls are not 
acorns, as the oak would have willed that they should be, but 
are the nearest approach to acorns that the oak can produce * 
under its affliction. I have examined hundreds, perhaps 
thousands, of these objects during the past and present 
autumns, and invariably with the same result. The gall 
consists of two parts,—the larger is spherical, the smaller 
* Mr. Inchbald, in the ‘ Field’ newspaper, strenuously opposed the doctrine 
(first introduced to public notice by the editor of that newspaper), that these 
galls are produced at the expense of the acorns. In a subsequent paper, 
reprinted in the sixth volume of the ‘Entomologist,’ p. 338, Mr. Parfitt 
expresses an opinion opposed to that of Mr. Inchbald, and argues that the 
solution there suggested is the correct one: Mr. Parfitt’s reply is logical, and 
extremely well argued. Of course I cannot reprint a paper so recently 
published in this journal. 
ee 
