950 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 
Entomologist,’ as already incidentally noticed in this journal. 
More recently Mr. H. F. Bassett—a most careful observer— 
states, at p. 91 of the fifth volume of the ‘Canadian Entomolo- 
gist,’ that “ Cynips quercus-operator, an American species, is 
double-brooded, one brood of females ovipositing in the buds 
of the oak, and again some of a second brood ovipositing in the 
young acorns of Quercus ilicifolia. From these and other facts 
he infers that all the American species, that are found only in 
the female sex, are represented in another generation by both 
sexes, and that the two broods are, owing to seasonal differ- 
ences, produced from galls that are entirely distinct from each 
other.” Whether this is only an ingenious conjecture, or an 
absolute discovery, I am unable to say; if the latter it may 
(in the hands of such painstaking men as Mr. Inchbald, - 
Mr. Smith, Mr. Parfitt, Mr. Marshall, and Mr. Fitch) supply 
a clew to the eventual discovery of the males of Cynips 
Lignicola. In the meantime the weight of evidence is thrown 
into the other scale. I know not when or where the state- 
ment originated, but I find myself in 1835, in the ‘Grammar 
of Entomology,’ describing the female Cynips (p. 210), as 
though a male had never been seen or thought of; and again, 
in my little pamphlet on the ‘ Physiological Classification 
of Animals,’ I have plainly stated that no male is known. 
In 1861 Mr. F. Smith, of the British Museum, sent me a 
paper on the subject, which, so far as negative evidence can 
go, seems completely to decide the question as to the non- 
existence of a male in Cynips Lignicola. I will cite portions of 
this paper :—“ In the year 1857 I felt desirous of satisfying 
myself as far as possible, by my own observations, of the 
truth ‘of the opinion at that time put forth by more than 
one eminent entomologist, that in the genus Cynips there is 
only one form of sex; in other words, that in the genus 
Cynips there is no male. In order to carry out my experi- 
ments I obtained from Devonshire a large supply of the galls 
of C. Lignicola, somewhere about a bushel and a half: every 
gall was tenanted by the Cynips or its parasite, Callimome 
Devoniensis. About the beginning of April, 1858, the Cynips 
began to issue from the galls, and continued to do so up to 
the end of May, at which time I could not have obtained less 
than twelve thousand examples, and many hundreds of its 
parasite. By examining the galls daily during the progress 
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