STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 807 
OAK. LIMBS. 
of my Report, some general remarks respecting them should here be intro¬ 
duced for popular information. 
The term “ gall ” is currently understood, and is quite common as a 
proverbial word in our community, as implying a substance of an extremely 
bitter taste; and this originally #as the'true and sole signification of this 
word. Several of these vegetable excrescences being intensely bitter, they 
hence came to be called galls and gall-nuts. And thus this term was extended 
to other similar substances, though destitute of this property, and has now 
in different languages become the technical designation for all kinds of 
vegetable swellings, excrescences, and other unnatural growths which are 
produced by the stings of insects, whether they possess any bitterness or 
not. Even the knot-like swellings which arc formed in the stalks of 
wheat by the Hessian fly and the Joint worm are true galls in the modern 
sense of this term. And the insects producing such swellings are called 
gall-flies. Nearly all of these insects pertain to two families, those which 
have four wings, like the one now under consideration, constituting the 
Cynips family in the order Hymenoptf.ra, and those with two wings form¬ 
ing the Cecidomyia group in the order Diptera. But as the insects of 
these two groups have no resemblance to each other, and correspond only 
in the one particular of producing excrescences by their stings, the latter 
are more correctly and definitely termed gall-midges, and it is the members 
of the Cy?iips family only to which the name gall-flies truly belongs. 
From ditlerences in their form and in the number of joints in their anten¬ 
nae, the gall-flies are divided into several genera. Of these genera that 
which retains the name Cynips is much the most numerous in its species. 
They are mostly very small insects resembling bees or ants of a short thick 
form, but with their antenna straight instead of elbowed, and with none 
of that activity in their movements which belong to the insects named. 
They are mostly of a coal black color, with pale legs and antenna, several 
of the species differing from each other only very slightly in size and in 
the hue of some particular part, being known with more certainty from the 
different galls from which they come than from the characters which the flies 
themselves present. In the several species here noticed, and ranked in the 
genus Cynips , five small longitudinal furrows may be seen on the thorax. 
I heir scutel is rounded and protuberant, with a rough granular surface. 
Their abdomen is highly polished and shining, in the females compressed 
and shaped like a lens, its outline being nearly round when viewed in pro¬ 
file, with its hind end usually more or less truncated or cut off in a straight 
line perpendicularly, with a projecting valve at its lower end, and above 
this the end of the sting protruding obliquely upward. It is equal in its 
size to the thorax, but is smaller in the males, and without the projecting 
sting. The wings are transparent and colorless, the forward pair with 
three longitudinal veins and two transverse or oblique vcinlets. The 
inner and middle longitudinal veins are abortive, being marked merely by 
very fine colorless lines, scarcely perceptible in the smaller species, and in 
strong contrast with the other vein and the vcinlets, which are coarse> 
