AFFECTION OF INSECTS FOR THEIR YOUNG. 204 
into it.! The Cicada, so celebrated by the poets of antiquity, which lays 
its eggs in dry wood, requires a stronger instrument of a different construc- 
tion. Accordingly it is provided with an excellent double auger, the sides 
of which play alternately and parallel to each other, and bore a hole of 
the requisite depth in very hard substances without ever being dis- 
laced. 
B The construction of the sting or ovipositor with which the different 
species of Ichneumon are provided, is not less nicely adapted to its various 
purposes. In those which lay their eggs in the bodies of caterpillars that 
feed exposed on the leaves of plants it is short, often in very large species 
not the eighth of an inch long: having free access to their victims, a longer 
sting would have been useless. But a considerable number oviposit in 
larvae which lie concealed where so short an instrument could not possibly 
approach them. In these, therefore, the sting is proportionably elongated, 
so much so that in some small species it is three or four times the length 
of the body. Thus in Pimpla Manifestator, whose economy has been so 
pleasingly illustrated hy Mr. Marsham%, and which attacks the larva of a 
wild bee (Chelostoma* mawillosa) lying at the bottom of deep holes in old 
wood, the sting is nearly two inches long; and it is not much shorter in 
the more minute JZ. Strobilelle L., which lays its eggs in larvae concealed in 
the interior of fir cones, which without such an apparatus it would never 
be able to reach, 
The tail of the females of many moths, whose eggs require to be pro~ 
tected from too severe a cold and too strong a light, is furnished, evidently. 
for application to this very purpose, with a thick tuft of hair. But how 
shall the moth detach this non-conducting material and arrange it upon 
her eggs? Her ovipositor is provided at the end with an instrument re- 
sembling a pair of pincers, which for this purpose are as good as hands. 
With these, having previously deposited her eggs upon a leaf, she pulls off 
her tuft of hairs, with which she so closely envelops them as effectually 
to preserve them of the required temperature, and having performed this 
last duty to her progeny she expires. 
The ovipositor of the capricorn beetles, an infinite host, is a flattened 
retractile tube, of a hard substance, by means of which it can introduce its: 
eggs under the bark of timber, and so place them where its progeny will 
find their appropriate food.® The auger used by certain species of Gistrus, 
to enable them to penetrate the hides of oxen or deer and form a nidus 
for their eggs, has been before described. — But to enumerate all the 
varieties of these instruments would be endless. 
The purpose which in the insects above mentioned is answered by their 
anai apparatus is fulfilled in the numerous tribes of weevils by the long. 
slender snout with which their head is provided. It is with this that Ba- 
laninus Nucum pierces the shell of the nut, and the weevil (Calandra gra- 
1 Prof. Peck’s Wat. Hist. of the Slug-worm, t. 12. f. 12—14. 
? Dr, Burmeister and M, Doyére consider the central piece of the borer of the 
Cicada as the really piercing organ, and the lateral files as only serving as a point 
of support; but Mr. Westwood states that numerous dissections of these parts have 
convinced him of the correctness of Reaumur’s description, that the lateral serrated 
Pieced are the real organs of perforation. (Mod. Class. of Ins. ii. 424.) 
Linn. Trans. iii. 28. + Apis. **, c. 2. y. K. 
5 See Kirby in Linn, Trans, vy. 254, t.12. f 16 
