INSECTS. 
Ill 
most cautious and stealthy gait, lifting up and putting down its feet 
apparently in the same careful manner as a pointer when approaching 
his game. When near enough to make the fatal dart, it plunges its 
piercer into the unfortunate caterpillar, and deliberately sucks out its 
juices. A small specimen experimented with, was placed in a box 
with ten caterpillars, all of which it destroyed in the space of five 
hours. 
THE ICHNEUMON FLY. 
( Ichneumon ?) 
An ichneumon-fly (PI. X. fig. 4) was found in the cotton-fields 
near Columbus, in Georgia, busily employed in search of some cater- 
pillar in the body of which to deposit its eggs, as is generally the 
habit of this class of flies. The eggs being hatched within the cater- 
pillar, the larvae devour the fatty substance, carefully avoiding all 
the vital parts, until they are fully grown, when the caterpillar, 
having in the mean time changed into a chrysalis, with the devour- 
ing larvae in its interior, the life of its unresisting victim is destroyed, 
and the grubs change into pupae, and eventually emerge from the 
chrysalis skin, perfect ichneumon-flies, to deposit their eggs in other 
caterpillars. . . „ , . , 
These insects are generally seen running about plants mlestecl with 
caterpillars or worms, continually jerking their wings, and anxiously 
searching in every cranny and crevice in quest of a subject, in winch 
to form the nest and provide food for their young. _ 
The circumstance of this fly’s coming from the slnn, or case ot 
the moth, or butterfly, is the cause of the mistakes so often made by 
persons not well versed in natural history; for, when a caterpillar is 
confined in a glass, and after the change to a chrysalis has taken 
place, when the real moth is expected to come out, and this fly makes 
its appearance, the young naturalist concludes, pf course, that the fly 
is produced by the caterpillar; whereas, the rightful tenant of the 
chrysalis-case had been previously displaced and devoured by the 
larva of the ichneumon-fly, which was produced from an egg placed 
by the parent fly in the body of the caterpillar. This fact is here 
noticed in consequence of some drawings of insects injurious to cotton 
having been sent to the Patent Office, among which an ichneumon- 
fly was figured as proceeding from the chrysalis of a caterpillar . This 
was correct, inasmuch as it was the parasite which had devoured the 
chrysalis, hut not true, when intended to represent the perfect insect 
as naturally proceeding from the caterpillar itself. 
Some chrysalides of the cotton-caterpillar, which had been pre- 
served during the autumn of 1855, as an experiment to try whether 
they would live until the following spring, having been hatched out 
prematurely by the heat of the room in which they were kept two 
ichneumon-flies were produced of a slender shape, and about half an 
inch in length; the abdomen, or body, of the female, was black, and 
marked with seven light-colored, yellowish narrow rings around it ; 
the head was black; with the eyes brown, the antennae long, jointed, 
