380 



HABITATIONS OF INSECTS. 



genus Cynips, the gall-fly, though they can with no propriety 

 be said to be constructed by the mother, who, provided with 

 an instrument as potent as an enchanter's wand, has but to 

 pierce the site of the foundation, and commodious apartments, 

 as if by magic, spring up and surround the germ of her future 

 descendants. I allude to those vegetable excrescences termed 

 galls, some of which resembling 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 I have 

 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, intro- 

 duces 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 respecting the Aleppo gall that it is actually a 

 capsule.^ Some are exactly round ; others like little mush- 

 rooms ; others resemble artichokes ; while others again might 

 be taken for flowers ; in short, they are of a hundred diflerent 

 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 



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 inhabi- 

 tants 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, &c. 



