HABITATIONS OF INSECTS. 289 



singular habitations of the larvae of the Linn^an genus Cynips, the gall- 

 fly, though they can with no propriety be said to be constructed by the 

 mother, who, provided with an instrument as potent as an enchanter's 

 wand, has but to pierce the site of the foundation, and commodious apart- 

 ments, as if by magic, spring up and surround the germ of her future 

 descendants. I allude to those vegetable excrescences termed galls, some 

 of which resembling beautiful berries and others apples, you must have 

 frequently observed on the leaves of the oak, and of which one species, 

 the Aleppo gall, as I have before noticed, is of such importance in the 

 ingenious art " dc peiiidre la parole ct de parler aux yeiix.^^ All these 

 tumors owe their origin to the deposition of an egg in the substance out of 

 which they grow. This egg, too small almost for perception, the parent 

 insect, a little four-winged fly, introduces into a puncture made by her 

 curious spiral sting, and in a few hours it becomes surrounded with a 

 fleshy chamber, which not only serves its young for shelter and defence, 

 but also, like those habitations last described, for food ; the future little 

 hermit feeding upon its interior and there undergoing its metamorphosis. 

 Nothing can be more varied than these habitations. Some are of a glo- 

 bular form, a bright red color, and smooth fleshy consistence, resembling 

 beautiful fruits, for which, indeed, as you have before been told, they are 

 eaten in the Levant : others, beset with spines or clothed with hair, are 

 so much like seed-vessels, that an eminent modern chemist has contended 

 respecting the Aleppo gall that it is actually a capsule.^ Some are exactly 

 round ; others like little mushrooms ; others resemble artichokes ; while 

 others again might be taken for flowers ; in short, they are of a hundred 

 different forms, and of all sizes from that of a pin's head to that of a 

 walnut. Nor is their situation on the plant less diversified. Some are 

 found upon the leaf itself; others upon the footstalks only ; others upon 

 the roots, and others upon the buds.^ Some of them cause the branches 

 upon which they grow to shoot out into such singular forms, that the plants 

 producing them were esteemed by the old botanists distinct species. Of 

 this kind is the Rose-willow, which old Gerard figures and describes as 

 " not only making a gallant shew, but also yeelding a most cooling aire 

 in the heatof summer, being set up in houses for the decking of the same." 

 This willow is nothing more than one of the common species, whose twigs, 

 in consequence of the deposition of the egg of a Cynips in their summits, 

 there shoot out into numerous leaves totally different in shape from the 

 other leaves of the tree, and arranged not much unlike those composing 

 the flower of a rose, adhering to the stem even after the others fall off". 

 Sir James Smith mentions a similar lusus on the Provence willows, which 

 at first he took for a tufted lichen."' From the same cause the twigs of 

 the common wild rose often shoot out into a beautiful tuft of numerous 

 reddish moss-like fibres wholly dissimilar from the leaves of the plant, 

 deemed by the old naturalists a very valuable medical substance, to which 

 they erroneously gave the name of Bedeguar. None of these variations 



' Aikin's Dictionary of Chemistry, i. 455. "What have probably been taken by Mr. Aikin 

 for " kernels," in the imperforated nuts, are the cocoons of the inhabitants of these galls in 

 the pupa state, which often extremely resemble the seeds of a capsule, as Reaumur (iii. 429.) 

 has remarked. 



« Reaum. iii. 417, &c. » Introd. to Botany^ 349. 



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