330 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 



Stature it is; each changes to a chrysalis, and forthwith to an 

 imago ; it then bursts a hole in its tortoise-like covering and 

 flies away, impatient to obtain its liberty. How different 

 from its former self; different from its arachnoid existence ; 

 different from its scale-like state, — it has now a transverse 

 hammer-shaped head, with moniliform antennae and facetted 

 eyes ; two ample wings which, when not in action, lie one 

 over the other flat on its back; and two long bristle-like tails 

 at the extremity of its abdomen protruding, far beyond the tips 

 of its wings. While the males thus undergo a metamorphosis 

 as complete as any recorded b)^ Ovid, the females are 

 "changeless as the eternal rocks;" they are obese and 

 apparently lifeless lumps; they receive the attentions of the 

 males with the most stolid indifference, and I even doubt 

 whether, in the economy of nature, it is a necessity for these 

 apathetic creatures to receive such attentions at all, for there 

 is no such a thing among scale-insects as an infertile female. 

 The female is so closely attached to the rind of the young 

 shoot, the sap of which she is sucking, that it is impossible to 

 remove without killing her: she gradually swells until she 

 attains an immense size, when her whole body becomes 

 a bag of eggs ; she begins laying with her body glued down 

 all round to the twig, but between her body and the rind, 

 except just at the edges, is a quantity of gummy cotton 

 spread over the whole space which she covers. The laying 

 of eggs is on a different system to that of other insects : the 

 first egg is laid in the cottony substance, without any 

 disturbance to the margin of the body glued to the rind ; it 

 does not adhere like the eggs of many other insects, but lies 

 loose in the cotton ; then another egg is laid, which pushes the 

 first a little forwards; and then another, and another, none of 

 them being visible from without ; so that all tlie eggs that a 

 female Coccus lays she incubates or sits on like an old 

 broody hen. As the eggs increase in number they also 

 increase in size, and the mass raises the ventral surface of 

 her body into a manifest concavity, so that the body itself 

 gets thinner and thinner, while tlie pile of eggs it covers 

 gets thicker and thicker. At last her stock of eggs is 

 exhausted ; the lower or ventral skin of her body meets the 

 upper or dorsal skin, and grows hard and fast against it: 

 then the old lady dies, and her body, — that is to say, what 



