A NATURE MEMORANDUM OF OCTOBER.
[To TH7 EDITOR 07 THE "sescreroa."1 Sia,—An October "memorandum " from Nature may possibly interest you. This has been the hottest summer I remember in London since 1868; yet I have not seen one wasp, in London or suburbs, this year. Two hundred and fifty miles North, some few days ago, I was positively " plagued " with them all over the house ; and therefore killed twenty-seven of them, at one battue from blinds and curtains, upon the dining-room window. Some time after " killing " them, as I thought, I noticed that one was not dead, and was seemingly stinging the thorax of another, round which he had curled himself. Remembering a naughty school-boy practice of my time, I touched the one still alive with a piece of india-robber. The wasp angrily curled his tail round to the rubber, stung at it ; and the sting adhered firmly, so that in removing the wasp, I caused him to lose his sting, dragging it from the tail, with what I may call the " root.' attached to it (a little speck in all). I at once killed the wasp ; " entirely " (shall I say ?) this time. It then occurred to me to pull the sting and root away from the india-rubber, by help of my penknife, to examine it. I observed that it still showed signs of " life " and activity. I touched it, to turn it over, with the rubber ; when, to my surprise, the sting stung at the same almost as energetically as it did while in that tiger-like muscular armed sheath, the wasp's body. This it did several times ; piercing the rubber, and adhering, more or less tenaciously. Now, we were not surprised at the sting showing signs of " life" —or, at all events, muscular action—after separation from the body, but at its showing the will to sting. Not the will not to sting, be it observed, which might just as readily have been, one would think, but the wasp-like angriness and eagerness to eting,
when touched.—I am, Sir, &c., B.
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