74 
FIRST ANNUAL REPORT OF THE 
by the eye of mortal entomologist. With grave and solemn deliberation she turns her 
body slowly round, deposits the egg as well as may be in the excavation already pre¬ 
pared for it, and finally, turning round once more, re-adjusts it with her snout, till it is 
completely embedded in its destined receptacle, with its outer surface slightly below 
the general level of tlio skin of the plum, and its inner surface overhanging a cavity 
twice or thrice as large as itself. 
“But,” the reader may perhaps ask, “ what is the use of this cavity ? Why not bore 
a hole just about the size of the egg, and then at once slip the egg into it?” My 
friend ! the mother Plum Gouger knows better than that! Providence has taught her 
that the plum, in which she is about to lay her egg, is a growing and living organism ; 
and she has learned as thoroughly as the most experienced human botanist, that any 
wound that she may produce in it will be speedily healed and tilled up by the repara¬ 
tive powers of nature. Providence taught her, too, long before human physiologists 
discovered this wonderful process of “ endosmosis,” as it is called, that an egg, full 
of thick, viscid matter and with a delicate membranous shell, when immersed among the 
thin sap of the green plum, will necessarily absorb a good deal of that sap, and thus 
increase considerably in size. She therefore allows full scope and to spare, both for the 
natural growth of the egg and for the natural growth of the plum. For she is well aware 
that the slightest pressure will rupture the delicate membrane, within which sleeps 
the microscopically minute embryo of the future Plum Gouger. And she is well 
aware, too, that it will be several days, at the least, before the seemingly inanimate 
egg will disclose the little larva, that will thereafter be abundantly able to fight the 
rest of his way, with his own good, strong jaws, through this sublunary world. — With 
all his acquired experience, and all his theoretical knowledge, and all his boasted 
reasoning powers, could a human workman have provided with more exquisite sim¬ 
plicity for the important object which was to be attained ? 
Whenever either a male or a female Plum Gouger desires to feed on the flesh of the 
Plum, they proceed precisely in the same way as the female does, when she excavates 
in the manner already described a receptacle for an egg. A plum, studded all over with 
these tiny holes, looks just as if somebody had been puncturing it with a common pin 
heated red hot. About the latter end of June, I shut up two Pium Gougers, which 
I had captured at large, in a glass vessel, along with about a dozen green plums, which 
I had previously examined and ascertained to be entirely free from punctures or cuts 
of any kind. In a week’s time, these plums were covered with just such punctures as 
those already spoken of, some exhibiting as many as twenty of them. None of these 
punctures contained any egg, so far as I could discover; and I repeatedly watched the 
insects through the glass as they completed one hole, and then immediately passed on 
and commenced another, without making any attempt to deposit an egg in the first. 
Possibly, however, these two Gougers might have been males, or, if females, they might 
have already exhausted their stock of eggs, or they might have refused to lay eggs, 
except in such plums as were actually growing on the tree. In not a single case, had 
either of them made the large, open hemispherical excavation peculiar to the Plum 
Curculio. Holes of the usual character, but bored simply for food, occur also in very 
large numbers in the plums as they hang on the trees. I have often, in the earlier part 
of the season, cut into eighteen or twenty of them, before I could find either egg or 
larva or the boring-work of a larva ; and I have counted as many as nine of them in 
a single plum, four only of which contained an egg. Later in the season, scarcely one 
hole out of fifty contains either egg or larva or any signs of a larva. Almost universally 
