122 SOCIAL HABITATIONS. 
pear-like form, and their exterior is defended by a few 
short, stout, and rather sharp prickles. 
IT cannot but think that the gall-insect affords a 
proof that the most insignificant objects of creation 
have their uses, provided that we could only discover 
them. Nature is a vast treasure-house, or rather a 
city of treasure-houses, very few of which have been 
unlocked, because no one has found the keys. No one 
indeed is likely to do so, as long as he chooses to 
despise “little things,” and if the only acknowledged 
benefit conferred on mankind by the insect tribes had 
been the ink-gall, it is a boon so great that every insect 
ought to deserve our respect as the possible donor of 
some similar aid to civilisation at present unknown. 
In the right hand upper corner of the illustration is 
seen a gall of some size, and nearly spherical. This 
is the celebrated DEap Sea APPLE, of which such strange 
stories have been told. 
This so-called fruit was said to be lovely and beautiful to 
the eye, but, instead of containing sweet juice, to be filled 
with bitter ashes, which filled the mouth as soon as it was 
bitten. Of course, the ashes were supposed to be drawn 
by the tree from the sunken remnants of the three evil 
cities beneath the bituminous waves of the Dead Sea, and 
to present tangible evidence of their existence. 
This story, which was implicitly believed for many 
centuries, was at length as decidedly discredited, and 
the whole narrative of the ash-filled fruit denounced 
as a mere fable. However, recent researches have 
proved, as is often the case, that the main facts of 
the story are true, though the inference to be derived 
from them has been entirely mistaken. In the first 
place, these seeming fruits are not produced by any 
