In the spring of 1694, some Galls hung down like chains upon the oaks in Germany, and the common people, who had never observed them before, imagined them to be magical knots.[478] A very old and common superstition is, that every oak-apple contains either a maggot, a fly, or a spider: the first foretelling famine, the second war, and the third, the spider, pestilence. Matthiolus gravely affirms this conceit to be true;[479] and the learned Sir Thomas Browne, in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, has thought it worth his while, with much gravity, to explode it. He, however, while combating one popular error, falls himself into another, for want of that philosophical knowledge of insects which later times have succeeded in obtaining. We pass this by, and hurry to his conclusion: “We confess the opinion may hold some verity in analogy, or emblematical phancy; for pestilence is properly signified by the spider, whereof some kinds are of a very venomous nature: famine by maggots, which destroy the fruits of the earth; and war not improperly by the fly, if we rest in the phancy of Homer, who compares the valiant Grecian unto a fly. Some verity it may also have in itself, as truly declaring the corruptive constitution in the present sap and nutrimental juice of the tree; and may consequently discover the disposition of the year according to the plenty or kinds of those productions; for if the putrefying juices of bodies bring forth plenty of flies and maggots, they give forth testimony of common corruption, and declare that the elements are full of the seeds of putrefaction, as the great number of caterpillars, gnats, and ordinary insects do also declare. If they run into spiders, they give signs of higher putrefaction, as plenty of vipers and scorpions are confessed to do; the putrefying materials producing animals of higher mischief according to the advance and higher strain of corruption.”[480] Moufet says: “In oak acorns and spongy apples sometimes worms breed, and astrologers presage that year to be likely to produce a great famine and dearth.... It is strange that Ringelbergius writes, _lib. de experiment_, that these worms may be fed to be as big as a serpent, with sheep’s milk; yet Cardanus confirms the same, and shewes the way to feed them, _Lib. de rer. varietat_.”[481] There is a very curious operation performed at the present day in the Levant with one of these Gall-flies, which is termed _caprification_. The object of it is to hasten the maturity of figs; and the species employed for that purpose is the _Cynips ficus caricæ_, or _Cynips psenes_ of Linnæus; it consists in placing on a fig-tree, which does not produce flowers or early figs, some of these last strung together with a thread. The insects which issue from them, full of fecundating dust, introduce themselves through the eye into the interior of the second figs, fecundate by this means all the grains, and provoke the ripening of the fruit.