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INSECT MAGICIANS. 



HE day approaches on which oak-apples, 

 bearing their gilded honours, will perpetuate 

 the memory of those their ancestral fruits, 

 which hung, in company with a hunted mon- 

 arch, on the tree of Boscobel. Whether 

 dressed in tinsel, or adorned by Nature's painting, these apples 

 of royalty are pretty things to look at ; and against the coming 

 anniversary (the 29th of May), which will bring them within 

 the reach of all, it may be worth inquiring whether they have 

 aught within deserving notice; or whether, as with the 

 merry monarch's self, they are to be estimated only for their 

 outward bravery. 



Pleasant to the taste these fair fruits are not (as well we 

 know by bitter experiences of childhood); so not daring to 

 bite, let us pull one of them asunder, or, dividing it with a 

 knife, reveal its secrets. We now see, surrounded and bounded 

 by spongy pulp, a set of cells, each with its solitary living 

 occupant for whose safe keeping, and that of his fellows, this 

 fruitlike tenement was called into existence, not by the labours 

 of a trifling artificer, but by the touch of a flying fairy. The 

 insect tenants of these pulpy palaces are not unlike, in one 

 condition of their being, to the scions of royal houses. It is 

 not improbable that before one of them has attained to the 

 majority of its winged estate, all may be despoiled of their 

 inheritance by a host of usurping parasites, such as, in palaces 

 reared by hands, have often enacted a resembling part. 



The above description of a common oak-apple, its Gall-fly 

 occupant, and Ichneumon intruder, may seem over-fanciful; 

 but in writing of Galls, our pen may possibly be carried from 

 the dry land of simple fact by some spirit of fiction in our ink, 

 an infusion, it is likely, of gall-nuts, the produce of the 



