nothing to do with the creation of its snug dwelling place. Its mother was the agent by whose means the excrescence sprang into existence.

There are many kinds of gall-flies, but they are all little four-winged creatures; the female being provided with a remarkable instrument which, when not in use, she can roll up and hide away under her abdomen. This is her ovipositor. When extended it is long and slender, serrated at the extremity like a saw, so that she may easily tear the tissues of the leaf, twig, or bough wherein she wishes to place her eggs. It is supposed that at the same moment that the puncture is made and the egg laid, an acrid fluid is discharged into the aperture, which causes the tissues of the tree to swell and form a tumour. Sometimes in a few hours, but never longer than two days after the fly's operations, the gall has attained its full size, containing in its very centre the object, too small almost for perception, for whose benefit this gigantic castle has appeared as if by magic.

Curiously enough the egg seems to derive nourishment from its surroundings; for it also grows and grows until at last the small white grub is developed curled up in, and living on, the gall. In this resort, "far from the madding crowd," the little creature undergoes all its metamorphoses, turning into a chrysalis, and then into the little fly, which eats its way out of its castle and flies away to propagate its kind and the houses in which they live.

Small as is the apartment which the little grub occupies, the swaying of the branches might cause it great inconvenience by knocking it from one side to another of its circular room. To prevent such a bruising of its body, it is provided with two tiny legs on the middle of its back, wherewith it may walk round the inner circle of its domain and cling to its ceiling in times of storm or tempest.

The varieties of galls, in size, shape, and colour are almost innumerable.

CYNIPS TERMINALIS (female).

Pick a branch of the wild rose, and most likely you will find growing around the stem a large mossylooking ball, sometimes green, sometimes purple, sometimes brilliant scarletalways an ornament to the plant on which it is found. This is nothing more than a

gall, and if cut through will be found to contain one or more tiny cells wherein their occupants lie snugly ensconced.

From the foot of an oak-tree we detach what looks like a small artichoke. This again is a gall. On the upper and under surface of certain of its leaves we find tufts and scales. All are galls. Hanging from the twigs, some of the catkins seem to have developed into irregular bunches of green currants. The pretty fruit-like globules have all been formed by the sting

of the little gall-fly. Some of these curious growths are like mushrooms; some like flowers; some so wonderfully like luscious fruit in appearance, that in the East they are eaten for such. Some of the little grubs, before turning into their pupa state, envelop themselves in cocoons and have been mistaken for seeds, looking much like tiny beans lying in their capsule.

All these enchanted palaces are called into existence by the magic sting of the same kind of fly. For a long time it was supposed that only fertile females existed, no gentlemen

being discovered. Quite recently, however, it has been found that though at certain seasons only females appear, at other times both sexes eat their way out of their snug nurseries and fly into the air to choose their wives. and husbands. In the spring, for instance, little redlegged dusky-winged ladies emerge from scale-like galls under the oak leaves, and they produce the little tufts on the top of the leaves from which both males and females come forth in the autumn.

CYNIPS TERMINALIS (male).

The excrescences are so infested with parasites that it is difficult to ascertain with accuracy the habits of

the tiny magicians, by whose enchantments dead-sea apples, spangles, bunches of fruit, balls of moss, beautiful flowers, gall nuts a hundred different shapes and sizes, are caused to spring, as it were, from nothing.

When "sending a letter to our love," or writing less absorbing documents, let us give a grateful thought to the fly who, unawares, provides us with the chief ingredient for the making up of the immortaliser of our thoughts.

"Lo! at their fairy touch at once springs forth
A magic growth of seeming fruits and flowers,
Fair to the eye, and animate within

By more than vegetative life."

IMAGO, PUPA, AND LARVA OF DEVIL'S COACH-HORSE.

CHAPTER XXXI.

THE DEVIL'S COACH-HORSE.

FROM the creation downwards, interwoven with the records of man's failures and misdeeds, and shining in glowing colours amid the tangled web of life's history, are the records of man's courage

and its triumphs. One of the most thrilling instances pictured forth in the Old Testament of the great courageous heart rising victorious over the small feeble body, and daring to set its strength against the merely physical force of a man-mountain, is that of little David defying the Philistine giant. Then again there are in the chronicles of all great nations accounts of the courageous few standing against, and oftentimes overcoming, the many, as in the instances of the three hundred brave Greeks who thwarted the million men of Xerxes at the pass of Thermopyla, and the terrible experience of the immortal Light Brigade at Balaclava.

Sometimes courage avails, sometimes it does not ;