Bassetia ligni, new species

GALLS (P1. XXIV, Fig. 1).-Cells within the wood of small twigs, usually not distorting the stem, or producing hardly noticeable swellings. Each cell is elongate-oval, about 1.0 by 2.5 mm., with a shell-like lining, distinct from but hardly separable from the wood; the cells lie wholly within the wood, which is not particularly modified; often a hundred or more are closely crowded in dense clusters. Exit holes, cleanly circular, about 0.5 mm. in diameter, disclose the infestation. On twigs of Quercus Douglasii.

Range: —California: Galt.

This very distinct genus regularly produces galls of about this simple type, and search for exit holes in otherwise undeformed twigs will prob-ably produce, as I have already experienced, more species of the group. Species have been obtained heretofore only from Georgia, Florida, Missouri, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico, but not from the Pacific Coast. Insects were still emerging at Galt on March 29, but apparently most of them had emerged previously. The galls were mostly in the two-year-old wood, only rarely in the wood of the previous summer; but whether it takes the species more than one year to develop I cannot say because it was not carefully determined at the time which galls were producing the emerging insects.

- Alfred Charles Kinsey: (1922) New Pacific Coast Cynipidae (Hymenoptera)^©