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In the intervals, he was perpetually busied in catching small cynips, and other kinds of flies, keeping up a smart snapping of his bill, almost similar to the noise made by knocking pebbles together." There is a plaintive expression in this musical supplication, that is apparent to all who hear it, no less than if the bird were truly offering prayers to some tutelary deity.
All these oak-apples and nut-galls are of importance, but the latter more especially, and they form an important article of commerce. A substance called "gallic acid" resides in the oak; and when the puncture is made by the cynips, it flows in great abundance to the wound.
In ascending this scale of being, while there is a progress upwards, the beetles, for instance, being higher than the bugs and grasshoppers; and the butterflies and moths, on the whole, being more highly organized than the flies; and while we see the hymenopterous saw-flies, with their larvæ mimicking so closely the caterpillars of the butterflies, in the progress from the saw-flies up to the bees we behold a gradual loss of the lower saw-fly characters in the Cynips and Chalcid flies, and see in the sand-wasps and true wasps a constant and accelerating likeness to the bee form.
The silkworm, the lac insect, and the bee need no apologist; a gallnut produced by the puncture of a cynips on a Syrian oak is a necessary ingredient in the ink I am writing with, and from my windows I recognize the grain of the kermes and the cochineal in the gay habiliments of the holiday groups beneath them.
A vegetable secretion and concretion is thus produced on oak-leaves by the gall-insect, and by the cynips in the bedeguar of the rose; and by the young grasshopper on many plants, by which the animal surrounds itself with froth. But in no circumstance is extra-uterine gestation so exactly resembled as by the eggs of a fly, which are deposited in the frontal sinus of sheep and calves.
"They are the work of a species of fly called Cynips, which is very apt to attack the oak. 'The female insect is armed with a sharp weapon called an ovipositor, which she plunges into a leaf and makes a wound. Here she lays her eggs; and when she has done so, she flies away and we hear no more of her. But the wound she has made disturbs the circulation of the sap.
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