The Life of the Weevil 
The craters in the sloes have their lava, 
that is, their flow of gum, which trickles from 
the various points injured and then hardens 
into blocks. This flood stops up every hole 
at which the insect has merely fed. The 
large pits with the central cones, on the other 
hand, have no gum or show only a few scanty 
drops of it on their walls. 
The mother, it is obvious, has taken 
certain precautions to defend the home of the 
egg against the inroads of the gum. In the 
first place, she has enlarged the cavity to 
keep the egg at a due distance from the 
treacherous wall oozing with viscidity; she 
has moreover dug the pulp down to the stone 
and has thoroughly stripped a perfectly clean 
surface from which nothing dangerous can 
now exude. 
This is not yet enough: though distant and 
rising perpendicularly from the stripped area, 
the walls of the pit still give cause for alarm. 
In some sloes under certain conditions, they 
will perhaps yield a superabundance of gum. 
The only means of averting the danger is 
to raise above the egg a barricade as high 
as the brink of the crater and capable of 
arresting the flow. This is the reason for 
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