BRITISH GALLS. 491 



legitimate occupants, and come to maturity in the cells that 

 were designed for others. 



Insects of totally diffeient orders sometimes make their ap- 

 pearance. When I began to take to pieces the gall which has 

 been described, I was rather surprised to find among the long 

 hairs an empty cocoon of the Galleria moth, whose ravages have 

 been mentioned in an earlier part of the volimie. On further 

 dissecting the gaU, no less than twelve other cocoons were 

 found, all buried so deeply in the hairs and among the woody 

 cells that they could not be seen until the hairy clothing was 

 removed. A person who was entirely ignorant of entomology 

 might naturally fancy that the moths were the architects of the 

 gall from which they had apparently issued. How they ob- 

 tained access to the galls, and on what food they lived, are two 

 problems that I can by no means solve. The drawer in which 

 the galls were placed is tightly closed, and all bee, wasp, and 

 hornet combs have been so treated with corrosive sublimate, that 

 they have not been touched by the caterpillars from which the. 

 moths had been developed. 



Theee is another gall, very common in England, which is 

 found upon the oak, and which is generally thought, i>j persons 

 who are unacquainted with botany or entomology, to be the 

 buds which naturally grow upon the tree. 



In these curious galls, the excrescences with which they are 

 covered take the form of leaves instead of hairs, as is the case 

 with the bedeguar and many other galls. These bud-like 

 objects may be found on the young twigs, and may be easily 

 recognised by their shape, which somewhat resembles that of a 

 pine-apple, and the curious manner in which their leafy covering 

 lies regularly over them, like the tiles upon an ornamental roo£ 

 The size of the gall is rather variable, but it is, on an average, 

 about as large as an ordinary hazel-nut. 



The gall is so wonderfully bud-like that I have known the 

 two objects to be confounded — ^the immature acorns in their 

 cups to be carried off as galls, while the real galls were left on 

 the tree. The incipient naturalist who made the mistake kept 

 the buds for some eighteen months, and was sadly disappointed 

 to find that no insects were produced from them. 



The insect whose acrid injection produces this curious efiiect 



