Kinsey: Gall Wasp Genus Cynips 
389 
This is the white oak (Q. alba), Atlantic Coastal Plain va- 
riety, the common Acraspis of the coastal region from Long 
Island to Florida, found in hybridization with wheeleri and 
with erinacei in southern New Hampshire and with wheeleri 
further south as far inland as the Alleghanies and the Great 
Smoky Mountains. Altho the name pezomachoides has hitherto 
been applied to all of the naked galls of this species, it should 
be restricted to this Coastal Plain insect, the types having come 
from Baltimore, Maryland. In the original description, Osten 
Sacken noted the large amount of rufous on the insect and the 
yellowish (yellow-rufous) color of the base of the abdomen, 
and these prove to be good key characters to the variety. We 
have not definitely connected insects of pezomachoides with 
the spiny form of the gall, and since we have had extensive 
field experience with this group, we may doubt whether pezo- 
machoides ever produces anything but a naked gall. It is to 
be noted that the closest relative of pezomachoides is the ex- 
clusively naked-gall variety derivatus. Unlike many other 
Coastal Plain gall wasps, pezomachoides does not occur in 
pure colonies at any point west of the Appalachians. Instead, 
pezomachoides is replaced in southern Indiana, in the Great 
Valley of the Tennessee, and thruout most of Georgia and 
Alabama by derivatus . From localities in northern Alabama 
and northern Georgia we have both derivatus and pezo- 
machoides with every gradation between. 
Pure populations of pezomachoides are restricted to a nar- 
row fringe of the northern Atlantic Coastal Plain, but pezo- 
machoides blood extends a great deal further northward and 
westward. It is possible that our present variety was the orig- 
inal inhabitant or close to the original inhabitant of the whole 
southeastern quarter of the United States. As just indicated, 
derivatus developed from it. The sub-Canadian variety 
tvheeleri, pushed southward by the Pleistocene glaciation, has 
largely submerged pezomachoides in the formation of a hybrid 
variety advena in the high country of Tennessee, and wheeleri 
also enters into hybrids with pezomachoides in many places 
east of the Appalachians. 
Nevertheless, the naked gall of pezomachoides is apparently 
dominant or constitutes a selected strain wherever the pezo- 
machoides x wheeleri cross occurs. In the Great Smokies and 
the Blue Ridge, one would believe that he was collecting galls 
of a pure population of pezomachoides, altho the bred insects 
