110 SOCIAL HABITATIONS. 
and I have bred great quantities of the insect. The 
creature which made them is named Cynips Kollari, in 
honour of the celebrated entomologist, and is plentiful on 
the Continent. I believe that it has long been known 
in Devonshire, though in Kent it has only recently made 
its appearance. 
The galls produced by this insect are wonderfully 
spherical, of a brown colour, smooth on the exterior, and 
about as large as white-heart cherries. ach contains 
a single insect, which undergoes all its changes within 
the gall, and eats its way ont when it has attained the 
perfect form. Occasionally two galls become fused 
together, and in my collection there is a very curious 
example of these twin galls. They form a figure like 
that of a rude hour-glass, and each portion has contained 
an insect. The inhabitant of one portion has eaten its 
way out and escaped, but the other has met with a 
singular fate. By some untoward error, it has taken a 
wrong direction, and instead of issuing into the world in 
the ordinary way, has hit upon the neck which connects 
the two galls, so that, instead of merely piercing half the 
diameter of the gall, it would have been forced to gnaw 
a passage equal to three half diameters. 
Natural powers are always adjusted to the work which 
their possessors have to perform. The insect was gifted 
with the capability of eating her way through the walls 
of her own habitation, but not with the power of making 
a passage through another gall afterwards, As a natural 
consequence, she has died from exhaustion before she 
could emerge into the air; and when I cut the double 
gall, in order to see how the inmates had fared, I found 
the dead insect lying near the middle of the second gall, 
so that she was even farther from the outer air that when 
she started on her course. 
