164 ANIMAL PARASITES AND MESSMATES. 



young, reminds us forcibly of the turning-box in which 

 they used formerly to place children whom they wished 

 to be brought up by public charity ; with this difference, 

 that young ichneumons are not only fed and taken care 

 of by some good neighbour, but that her body itself 

 serves them as food. 



It has sometimes happened that entomologists, 

 instead of finding beautiful butterflies produced from the 

 caterpillars which they had reared, have had nothing 

 hatched but a brood of ichneumons. Was it not natural 

 then for them to dream of the transformation of species, 

 when they saw issuing from the skin of a caterpillar, 

 which is usually transformed into a beautiful chrysalis, 

 a swarm of small winged flies which disperse with the 

 rapidity of lightning ? These ichneumons discover with 

 astonishing ingenuity the caterpillar which can bring 

 up their young, and they often reach it with their ovi- 

 positor in the midst of a fruit, or in the substance of 

 a branch of a tree. Every one knows the Anobium 

 and other little beetles which attack wood, and live in 

 the dark galleries which they excavate. The mother 

 ichneumon knows perfectly how to discover the beetle 

 which bores into our furniture, and winged ichneumons 

 have often been seen to proceed from worm-eaten wood. 

 It is not only caterpillars that are sought by ichneumons 

 for the sake of their young; many kinds of larvse oi' 

 coleoptera and hemiptera, of aphides and weevils, are 

 attacked by the mother ichneumons, which plunge their 

 ovipositors between their articulations. These winged 

 corsairs well know the weak points of their cuirass. 



Ichneumons are therefore decidedly parasitical at this 

 first period of their life. As they approach maturity, the 



