312 
HALF HOURS WITH INSECTS. [Packard. 
spins a thin, silken, whitish cocoon. Other species take up 
their abode in galls made by two-winged gall gnats, and are 
hence called guest or “inquiline” saw-flies. These galls are 
sometimes inhabited also by a caterpillar, so that we have a 
saw-fly caterpillar, a true caterpillar, and a maggot making 
use of the same kind of gall. They do not, however, crowd 
into the same domicile at once. In this case at any rate 
nature does not set the laws of hygiene at defiance, and 
crowd two or three families in a single room. The necessi¬ 
ties of modern civilization, or an outgrowth from it in our 
cities, crowd several families in a single room. Is not a 
human life of as much account as a caterpillar’s ? 
The saw-flies with their exceptional gall-making habits 
anticipate in nature the true gall flies, those singular beings 
Fig. 244. to whom a gall is their world, and 
the gall of bitterness a perennial foun¬ 
tain of nectar. To these little white 
maggots, the young gall flies, the poor 
scribbler who is obliged like Douglas 
Jerrold to feed his family “out of an 
inkstand,” owes his all. Quite uncon¬ 
scious of the responsibility resting 
upon him, our maggot, truly an “ unconscious automaton,” 
by its simple presence in the leaf or stem, and with no more 
intention to be an agent in bringing about a desired result 
than though it were a grain of sand, lies passively in its cell, 
while the growth-force of the plant erects a house over and 
around this foreign body. No more intellectual act is needed 
on the part of the guest than in its unconscious host, the 
plant. The case of the gall maggot is an excellent example 
of “unconscious automatism,” while I imagine the reader 
will agree with me that the case of the white ant, or the true 
ants, as well as many bees and wasps, is of an entirely dif¬ 
ferent order and carries us into a sphere where the sensibili¬ 
ties, the will, and the intellect exert at least some force. 
24 
Basket Worm. 
