THE YOUNG NATURALIST. 



portion for this class of insects. While they waited in spirit for more 

 careful examination, I weighed over in my mind the curious problem 

 which the insects had presented. Here were caterpillars spinning a 

 cocoon after the fashion of silkworms (Lepidoptera), yet the insects 

 which emerged from the case were evidently Hymenopterous. Every 

 student knows that striking anomalies of this kind often enable him 

 more readily to find a clue to the mystery he wishes to solve than do 

 a long series of regular and normal transformations. So here, the 

 facts noted pointed indubitably to the Tenthredinidae, concerning 

 which family Figuier says (The Insect World, p. 399), " The larvae of 

 these insects have a striking resemblance to the caterpillars of Lepi- 

 doptera. They can only be distinguished from them by a great 

 globular head, not hollowed out, and by their abdominal legs, in 

 general to the number of more than ten. They are called false cater- 

 pillars. They spin a silken cocoon before changing into pupae." 



Here, then, we are able to take our start : our insect is Hymen- 

 opterous, and belongs to the saw-fly family or Tenthredinidae, which 

 with the tailed wasps (Sericidae) from the tribe Phytophaga. In 

 looking up the modern literature of the subject I was doomed to dis- 

 appointment. Though I soon found that the insect, known to En- 

 tomologists as Lophyrus pini, was mentioned in all the text books, I 

 also found that few of them gave any details of its life-history, and 

 what was more tantalizing, whenever a figure appeared it was also 

 the same old illustration of a male, magnified two diameters, with no 

 hint as to the fact that it was enlarged, or if so, no particulars about 

 the extent of magnification. The reader will find Lophyrus pini, male, 

 magnified to twice its original size, and always the same impression, 

 in Figuier, p. 399 ; in Mr. Bath's Ants, Bees, &>c. (Young Collector's 

 Series), p. 32, misprinted Lophryus) ; in Cassell's Natural History, Vol. 

 VI., p. 8, and elsewhere. Mr. Bath says not one word about the 

 insect, Figuier simply informs us that " the Lophyrus pini, which 

 devours the leaves of pine trees, belongs to this family," while Cassell's 

 book gives us five lines in all. Perhaps it is because every entomolo- 

 gist knows so much about the insect that he passes it by in silence, but 

 if this be the case, those who (like myself) can only know it by personal 

 study — not having costly text books to refer to — will pardon these 

 first-hand observations. Withering was not ignorant of the ravages 

 of the caterpillars, for, though no mention is made of them in the 5th 

 Ed. (1812) of British Plants, yet in the 7th Ed. (1830) we read (p. 819) 

 that the " Pine forests of Scotland are the most productive places 

 for the uncommon (sic) Lophyrus pini (Curtis, British Entomologist, 



