The Life of the Weevil 
of the thapsus. On this occasion, I am glad 
to see, the term could not possibly be 
happier: it enables the novice to identify the 
insect exactly, without other data than the 
name of the plant on which it lives. 
The botanist gives the name of Verbascum 
thapsus to the common mullein, or shepherd’s 
club, a lover of the tilled fields in both the 
north and the south. Its bloom, instead of 
branching out like that of the scollop-leaved 
mullein, consists of one thick cone of yellow 
flowers. These flowers are followed by 
close-packed capsules about as big as a fair- 
sized olive. Here we no longer have the 
niggardly pods in which the grub of the 
Cionus would die of starvation if it did not 
abandon them as soon as it is hatched; these 
caskets contain plenty of victuals for one 
larva and even for two. A partition divides 
them into two equal compartments, both of 
them crammed with seeds. 
The fancy took me to estimate roughly 
the mullein’s wealth of seeds. I have 
counted as many as 321 in a single shell. 
Now a spike of ordinary size contains 150 
capsules. The total number of seeds is there- 
fore 48,000. What can the plant want with 
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