814 
ANNUAL REPORT OF NEW YORK 
OAK. LEAVES. 
texture and duller color, resembling 
a ball of sponge rather than wool. 
These remain through the winter, 
though their attachment to the twig 
is so slight that birds picking into 
them, they are often torn off and fall 
to the ground. Internally, adjoining 
the twig, they consist of a mass of 
white hard grains resembling seeds, 
each of which yields a fly. 
The two sexes differ remarkably 
in their colors, the head and thorax 
being black in the male, with the 
mouth only cinnamon red, whilst in 
the female the whole of these parts 
is of this color, the abdomen only 
being black. It is the male only 
which is described by Dr. Harris, 
and a person with specimens of the 
female in his hands would not sus¬ 
pect them to be the species of which 
he treats. The female is much the 
most common. A single gall gave 
me forty specimens of this sex and 
only one male. 
AFFECTING THE LEAVES. 
3IG. Oak-wool gall-fly, Cfjnips Quercus-lana, new species. 
A round mass resembling wool, the size of a hazelnut or walnut, and of 
a white or buff color, growing upon one of the principal veins on the under 
side of white oak leaves, and producing several small black flies with white 
or straw colored heads, antennae and legs, and with shining smoky yellow 
abdomens, having a black or blackish cloud occupying their back and sides, 
the females with fifteen-jointed antennae, and their length 0.09. 
It is not a little curious that two insects so nearly identical as the Oak- 
tumor and the Oak-fig gall-flies, should produce galls which are totally 
dissimilar—the one being merely a smooth swelling of the bark, the other 
a mass of semi-collapsed bladders the size of acorns crowded together around 
the limb—whilst here, on the other hand, we have two insects which have 
little resemblance to each other, yet producing galls which can scarcely be 
distinguished the one froth the other. No one noticing on our white oaks 
these little round bunches of buff colored wool in which the young of the 
AVool-sower and of the Oak-wool gall-flies are cradled, growing perhaps 
but a few inches apart, one on a leaf the other on a twig, would suspect 
