498 MISCELLANIES BY SOLITARIUS. 



great tenacity of life which some insects possess, it has brought to my 

 recollection a fact that occurred three years ago, which I confess I could 

 not have credited had it not passed under my own observation. I had 

 purchased twenty large hives and a hogshead of Dutch honey in the 

 natural state, not separated from the wax, which had been in my 

 friend's warehouse above a year ; and after emptying my hives as well 

 as I could, I boiled them for a considerable time in water to obtain 

 what honey remained between the interstices. A considerable number 

 of bees that had been mixed with the Tioney were floating on the 

 surface of the water, and these I skimmed off and placed on flag-stones 

 outside my laboratory, which was at the top of the house, and then 

 exposed to a July meridian sun. You may imagine my astonishment 

 when, in half an hour, I saw scores of these same bees that had been 

 for months in a state of suffocation, and then well boiled, gradually 

 come to life and fly away. There were so many of them that I closed 

 the door, fearing that they might be disposed to return and punish me 

 for the barbarous usage they had received at my hands." A friend at 

 Laytonstone informed me that upon pulling down part of his cottage 

 during the winter some time since, a wasp was discovered, seemingly 

 dead, but of a very fresh and bright appearance, and which, upon 

 being held to the fire, became re-animated, as did the bees in the above 

 instance. 



Last Friday I found two specimens of some species of Phryganea, 

 attached to the branches of an osier, on the banks of the river Wandle, 

 near Merton. Is it not very late in the year to find any species of 

 these flies ? 



The snail of which Ruricola speaks (p. 320), as having been intro- 

 duced from Spain into England, is most probably the Helix pomalia of 

 Linnaeus, which Sir Kenelm Digby and Da Costa consider as having 

 been imported hither, and which Turton, in his Manual of British 

 Shells, considers as the species mentioned by Sallust, as having been 

 " so instrumental in the capture of the castle near the river Malacha, 

 in Spain, and which effected the termination of the Jugurthan war." 

 A coloured plate of this species he will find in the above work, where 

 it is described as being " two inches long and as many inches high, 

 rather solid, with the body evolution extremely large and inflated, the 

 others very little rounded, strongly .striate across, and minutely so in 

 spiral direction; colour whitish, with the bands hardly visible, or pale 

 tawny, with usually four darker bands, two of them penetrating the 

 aperture at the pillar : aperture somewhat orbicular, longer than broad. 



