AFFECTION OF INSECTS FOR THEIR YOUNG. 303 



habits, for so interesting an insect. The family of this field- 

 bug consists of thirty or forty young ones, which she conducts 

 as a hen does her chickens. She never leaves them ; and as 

 soon as she begins to move, all the little ones closely follow, 

 and whenever she stops assemble in a cluster round her. De 

 Geer having had occasion to cut a branch of birch peopled 

 with one of those families, the mother showed every symptom 

 of excessive uneasiness. In other circumstances such an alarm 

 would have caused her immediate flight ; but now she never 

 stirred from her young but kept beating her wings incessantly 

 with a very rapid motion, evidently for the purpose of pro- 

 tecting them from the apprehended danger.^ — As far as our 

 knowledge of the economy of this tribe of insects extends, 

 there is no other species that manifests a similar attachment 

 to its progeny; but such may probably be discovered by 

 future observers. 



It is De Geer also that we have to thank for a series of in- 

 teresting observations on the maternal affection exhibited by 

 the common earwig. This curious insect, so unjustly traduced 

 by a vulgar prejudice, — as if the Creator had willed that the 

 insect world should combine within itself examples of all that 

 is most remarkable in every other department of nature, — still 

 more nearly approaches the habits of the hen in her care of 

 her family. She absolutely sits upon her eggs as if to hatch 

 them — a fact which Frisch appears first to have noticed — 

 and guards them with the greatest care. De Geer, having 

 found an earwig thus occupied, removed her into a box where 

 was some earth, and scattered the eggs in all directions. She 

 soon, however, collected them one by one with her jaws into 

 a heap, and assiduously sat upon them as before. The young 

 ones, which reseml ;le the parent except in wanting elytra and 

 wings, and, strange to say, are as soon as born larger than 

 the eggs which contained them, immediately upon being 

 hatched creep like a brood of chickens under the belly of the 

 mother, who very quietly suffers them to push between her 

 feet, and will often, as De Geer found, sit over them in this 

 posture for some hours. ^ This remarkable fact I have myself 



1 De Geer, iii. 262. 



2 Ibid. 548. 



