148 LARV4 UNDER WATER-LILY LEAVES. [PART II. 
Another ingeniously constructed infant nursery 
came under my notice whilst on a visit to a friend 
near Marlow. Having observed that several of 
the water-lily leaves floating on the surface of a 
moat were perforated by cleanly cut circular holes, 
nearly the size of a florin, I was induced to turn 
up these and some of the adjacent leaves, when 
Janeiro, and refers to a paper in the Journal of the Asiatic 
Society of Bengal, by Lieut. Hutton, who describes a kind of 
Sphex and also a Pomptlus which construct their cells side 
by side, and store them with spiders. 
Kirby and Spence assert (apparently on the authority of 
Bonnet) that the Mason Wasp “not only encloses a living 
caterpillar along with its eggs in the cell, which it carefully 
closes, but at the expiration of a few days, when the young 
grub has appeared and consumed its provision, reopens the 
nest, incloses a second caterpillar, and again shuts the mouth.” 
Can it be that the caterpillars which were thus seen to be 
brought to the nest on successive days, and supposed to be for 
the eggs collectively, may have been, as in the case I have 
mentioned, each destined for its particular egg? In the nest 
I have described I am satisfied that it was impossible for the 
parent Wasp to communicate with the upper cells except by 
destroying those below it. 
Further notices of similar insects will be found in Gosse’s 
Letters from Alabama, page 244, where there is also given an 
illustration representing a Pelopwus flavipes in the act of 
carrying a spider to its cell; and in Sir James E. Tennent’s 
Ceylon, 1. 256. According to this latter author the Sphegida 
there lay their eggs in the pupe of other insects before de- 
positing them in the cells, 
