650 
NATURAL HISTORY. 
naki, which perfectly changes into a vegetable substance, but 
likewise wants the bulrush ; this was dug up in great num- 
bers in the garden of J. Wicksteed, Esq., at New Plymouth ; 
a specimen of cicada was brought to me which had undergone 
this change, and had also a perfect plant growing from its 
neck, very much resembling a small white fungus found 
on decayed wood ; this I named after its finder, Sphceria 
Basilii; insects having a vegetative process of a similar kind, 
have been discovered in other parts of the world; and, 
probably, when the flora of each country is more carefully 
examined, will be found existing in most of them. 
Attwood, in his history of Dominica, gives the following 
account of a vegetable fly found in that island : — " It is of the 
appearance and size of a small cockchafer, and buries itself 
in the ground, where it dies : and from its body springs up a 
small plant, which resembles a young coffee-tree, only that its 
leaves are smaller ; it is often over-looked from the supposi- 
tion people have of its being none other, but on examining 
it properly, the difference is easily distinguished — the head, 
body, and feet of the insect appearing at the root as perfect 
as when alive.” 
In the American Philosophical Transactions , the Rev. 
Nicholas Collins describes “ a certain zoophyton in the Ohio 
county/'’ which he declares is both vegetable and animal ; for 
having crawled about the woods in its animal state till it 
grows weary of that mode of existence, it fixes itself in the 
ground, and becomes a stately plant, with a stem issuing out 
of its mouth. 
A small vegetating caterpillar is also found in Britain, the 
sphceria entomorhiza. The Chinese also have a similar plant, 
sphceria sinensis, called by them hea tsaou tungehung, or the 
summer vegetable winter insect. In Van Diemen’s Land 
there is a vegetating caterpillar, sphceria Gunnii ; it some- 
what resembles the New Zealand one, from which it chiefly 
differs in having the stem of its vegetating process thicker 
than the insect from which it arises. 
A Polistes attacked by many kinds of a filamentous 
sph seria was described by Felton in the Philosophical Trans- 
