STATES OF INSECTS. 67 



assured me that several females which he caught pro- 

 jected their eggs to the distance of more than ten inches. 



A few Diptera extrude them in a sort of chain or 

 necklace, each egg being connected by a glutinous mat- 

 ter with that which precedes and follows it. In a small 

 species of a genus allied to Psychoda (a kind of midge), 

 which one season was abundant in a window of my house, 

 this necklace is composed of eggs joined by their sides, 

 not unlike those strung by children of the seeds of the 

 mallow 3 . Other Tipulidce on the contrary extrude their 

 eggs joined end to end, so as to resemble a necklace of 

 oval beads. Beris clavipes and Sciura Tho?nce, two other 

 flies, produce a chain about an inch long, consisting of 

 oval eggs connected, in an oblique position, side by side ; 

 an arrangement very similar prevails in the ribband of 

 eggs which drop from some of the Ephemerce h . 



These eggs, like those of the insects first mentioned, 

 though connected, are expelled in succession ; but other 

 tribes, as the Libellulidce, with the exception of Agrion, 

 many Ephemerae, Trichopterous insects, &c. expel the 

 whole at once, as it were in a mass. In those first men- 

 tioned they are gummed together in- an oblong cluster . 

 In one Ephemera mentioned by Reaumur d , they formed 

 two oblong masses, each containing from three to four 

 hundred eggs, and three and a half or four lines long. 

 These animals as soon as their wings are developed eject 

 these masses by two orifices, and are aided in the process 

 by two vesicles full of air, wherever they happen to alight 

 or to fall ; in most instances it is the water, their proper 

 element, that receives them, but the animal does not ap- 

 pear to know the difference between a solid and a liquid, 



a Plate XX. Fig. 20. b Reatim. vi. 509. t. XLj.f. U, 12. 



c Reaum. vi. 434. d Ibid. vi. 494. 



F 2 



