254 HABITATIONS OF INSECTS. 
but to pierce the site of the foundation, and commodious apartments, as it 
by magic, spring up and surround the germ of her future descendants. [ 
allude to those vegetable excrescences termed galls, some of which re- 
sembling beautiful berries and others apples, you must have frequently 
observed on the leaves of the oak, and of which one species, the Aleppo 
gall, as Lhave before noticed, is of such importance in the ingenious art 
“de peindre la parole et de parler aux yeux.” All these tumours owe their 
origin to the deposition of an egg in the substance out of which they 
grow. This egg, too small almost for perception, the parent insect, a little 
four-winged fly, introduces into a puncture made by her curious spiral 
sting, and in a few hours it becomes surrounded with a fleshy chamber, 
which not only serves its young for shelter and defence, but also, like 
those habitations last described, for food ; the future little hermit feeding 
upon its interior and there undergoing its metamorphosis. Nothing can 
be more varied than these habitations. Some are of a globular form, a 
bright red colour, and smooth fleshy consistence, resembling beautiful 
fruits, for which, indeed, as you have before been told, they are eaten in 
the Levant: others, beset with spines or clothed with hair, are so much 
like seed-vessels, that an eminent modern chemist has contended re- 
specting the Aleppo gall that it is actually a capsule. Some are exactly 
round ; others like little mushrooms ; others resemble artichokes ; while 
others again might be taken for flowers ; in short, they are of a hundred 
different forms, and of all sizes from that of a pin’s head to that of a 
walnut. Nor is their situation on the plant less diversified. Some are 
found upon the leaf itself; others upon the foot-stalks only; others upon 
the roots, and others upon the buds.? Some of them cause the branches 
upon which they grow to shoot out into such singular forms, that the 
plants producing them were esteemed by the old botanists distinct species. 
Of this kind is the Rose-willow, which old Gerard figures and describes as 
“ not only making a gallant shew, but also yeelding a most cooling aire in 
the heat of summer, being set up in houses for the decking of the same.” 
This willow is nothing more than one of the common species, whose twigs, 
in consequence of the deposition of the eg¢ of a Cynips in their summits, 
there shoot out into numerous leaves totally different in shape from the 
other leaves of the tree, and arranged not much unlike those composing 
the flower of a rose, adhering to the stem even after the others fall off. 
Sir James Smith mentions a similar /usus on the Provence willows, which 
at first he took for a tufted lichen. From the same cause the twigs of 
the common wild rose often shoot out into a beautiful tuft of numerous 
reddish moss-like fibres wholly dissimilar from the leaves of the plant, 
deemed by the old naturalists a very valuable medical substance, to which 
they erroneously gave the name of Bedeguar. None of these variations 
is accidental or common to several of the tribe, but each peculiar to the 
galls formed by a single and distinct species of Cynips. 
The Poma Sodomitica, mala insana, or apples of the Dead Sea, beautiful 
to the eye, but filling the mouth with bitter ashes if tasted, whose exist- 
1 Aikin’s Dictionary of Chemistry, i. 455. What have probably been taken by 
Mr. Aikin for “kernels,” in the imperforated nuts, are the cocoons of the inhabitants 
of these galls in the pupa state, which often extremely resemble the seeds of a 
capsule, as Reaumur (iii, 429.) has remarked, 
2 Reaum, iii. 417, &e, 3 Introd, to Botany, 349. 
