KATHY G. writes:
One of my favorite books when I homeschooled my children, was a large, charming one-hundred-year-old book, titled The Handbook of Nature Study, by Anna Botsford Comstock. In fact, I enjoyed it far more than my children did!
An excerpt of an entry called “The Gall Dwellers”, pg. 335:
“Although Aladdin is out of fashion, we still have houses of magic that are even more wonderful than that produced by his resourceful lamp. These houses are built through an occult partnership between insects and plant tissues; we do not understand exactly how they are made, although we are beginning to understand a little concerning the reasons for the growth. These houses are called galls and are thus well named, since they grow because of an irritation to the plant caused by the insect.
“There are many forms of these gall dwellings, and they may grow upon the root, branch, leaf, blossom, or fruit. The miraculous thing about them is that each kind of insect builds its magical house on a certain part of a certain species of tree or plant; and the house is always of a certain definite form on the outside and of a certain particular pattern within. Many widely differing species of insects are gallmakers; and he who is skilled in gall lore knows, when he looks at the outside of the house, just what insect dwells within it.
“We may take the history of the common oak apple as an example. A little, four-winged, flylike creature, a wasp, lays its eggs, early in the season, on the leaf of the scarlet oak. As soon as the larva hatches, it begins to eat into the leaf ….” (cont.)
This wonderful book, which unfortunately teaches the heliocentric model, was out of print, but it is now available in paperback. I recommend trying to find an old, hardback edition.
