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560 relations to its hosts, are still matters of doubt. Mr. Andrew Murray, a well-known naturalist, has recently published an essay on this subject which has given rise to much discussion. "Is it," says Mr. Murray, "as a robber and a murderer that it appears, or simply as a guest? And if as a guest, is it as a cuckoo-guest usurping the place of the genuine offspring of its hosts, or as an inoffensive changeling, innocendy imposed on the unconscious parents, and merely filling up a place which (from the wasp point of view) might have been better supplied had it been left empty." The former and more truculent view is supported by an observation recorded by Mr. Stone, who found a larva of Rhipiphorus sticking to the larva of a wasp, which it devoured, except the skin and mandibles, in forty-eight hours.

Prior to this apparently conclusive observation, Latreille, and most entomologists, although speaking doubtfully, yet, on the whole, inclined to the opinion that the Rhipiphori were bred by the wasps under the mistaken belief that they were their own progeny. On the strength of his having, in three instances, found two pupæ in the same cell—a wasp pupa and a Rhipiphorus pupa—Mr. Murray adopts the latter view; regarding it as conclusive evidence against the idea of the one feeding on the other. "They must," he observes, "have been hatched in the same cell, bred lovingly as larvæ in the same cell, and undergone their metamorphoses in the same cell .... Their positions were remarkable. In one of them the pupa of the wasp was near the mouth of the cell, but with its tail to the mouth; and the pupa of the Rhipiphorus farther in, with its tail to the base of the cell—their heads thus meeting." A sketch of this Damon and Pythias, in the position in which they were found, may be seen in the Horticultural Society's collection of Economic Entomology at South Kensington, where also their bodies may be seen embalmed in Canada balsam. It is worthy of notice that, in this intricate and difficult inquiry, Mr. Murray has received the greatest aid from Miss Eleanor Ormerod, of Sedley Park, Chepstow, a sister of Dr. Ormerod, and "a lady with more of the true spirit and genius of a naturalist than any other whom it has been my" (Mr. Murray's) "fortune to encounter." Dressed up in much the same fashion that we described in an early part of this article, she fearlessly handles, rifles, or removes the largest and most formidable nest. That her patience and perseverance are not inferior to her courage is sufficiently evidenced by the fact that, before sending to Mr. Murray the nest from which he made his observations, she had picked out of it no less than three thousand larvæ and pupæ. We cannot conclude without expressing the wish that Dr. Ormerod and his plucky sister may long remain unstung.

OLD the reins, and I will show you her photograph," Theodore Devrient said to me, bracketing, at the same time, the whip, as we bowled along in his dogcart.

I took them, and Theodore got out his pocket-book, and extracted from it a carte which he handed to me. He took the reins again, and I looked at the portrait. It represented a girl possessed of a sweet, rather than a striking, attractiveness; one of those faces that gather light and loveliness, rather than lose them, the more they are seen. A refined face, gray-eyed; with, perhaps, something of a dreamy expression; all the features good, though small. Just such a girl as would make a fair, true English wife, and cause the days of life to roll pleasantly on amid such English scenery of upland and lowland; such quiet villages far from the city; such houses, of a somewhat patrician stamp, scattered here and there behind their lawns and gates, as characterized the district through which we were driving.

"I like the look of her, Theodore," I said. "I suppose there is some obstacle, as usual. Tell us all about it."

"I shall bore you," my friend replied. "And, besides, we shall be after time if we dawdle; and dawdle we shall, somehow or other, if we begin to talk. And I don't want to irritate her governor by being late at his cricket match; he's sufficiently obdurate already."

Thus speaking, Theodore laid his lash lightly across his mare's shoulders, and we went on faster.

"I should have thought the governor would have been sympathetic, as one cricketer with another," I said.

"So he is," Theodore returned. "That's why the thing's so hopeless. If he had cut