that it comes to the surface, head foremost instead of tail first, a position according better with its increased age and experience in pond life. In a few days the pupa skin is cast; the insect, availing itself of its old habiliments as a raft upon which to float while its body is drying, grows lighter, and its wings expand for its marriage flight. The males are beautiful, both physically and morally, as they do not bite; their manners are more retiring than those of their stronger minded partners, as they rarely enter our dwellings, and live unnoticed in the woods. They may be easily distinguished from the females by their long maxillary palpi, and their thick, bushy, feathered antennae. The female lays her elongated, oval eggs in a boat-shaped mass, which floats on the water. A mosquito lives three or four weeks in the water before changing to the adult or winged stage. How many days they live in the latter state we do not know. [Illustration: 62. Larva and Pupa of the Mosquito.] Our readers will understand, then, that all flies, like our mosquito for example, grow while in the larva and pupa state, _and after they acquire wings do not grow_, so that the small midges are not young mosquitoes, but the adult winged forms of an entirely different species and genus of fly; and the myriads of small flies, commonly supposed to be the young of larger flies, are adult forms belonging to different species of different genera, and perhaps of different families of the suborder of Diptera. The typical species of the genus Culex, to which the mosquito belongs, is Culex pipiens, described by Linnaeus, and there are already over thirty North American species of this genus described in various works. Few insects live in the sea, but along the coast of New England a small, slender white larva (Fig. 63a, magnified, and head greatly enlarged; Fig. 64, pupa and fore foot of larva, showing the hooks), whose body is no thicker than a knitting needle, lives between tides, and has even been dredged at a depth of over a hundred feet, which transforms into a yellow mosquito-like fly (Fig. 65, with head of the female, magnified) which swarms in summer in immense numbers. I have called it provisionally Chironomus oceanicus, or Ocean gnat. The larvae of other species have been found by Mr. S. I. Smith living at great depths in our Northern lakes. These kinds of gnats are usually seen early in spring hovering in swarms in mid air. [Illustration: 65. Ocean Gnat.] [Illustration: 63. Larva of Ocean Gnat.] [Illustration: 64. Pupa of Ocean Gnat.] The strange fact has been discovered by Grimm, a Russian naturalist, that the pupa of a feathered gnat is capable of laying eggs which produce young during the summer time. Previous to this it had been discovered that a larva of a gnat (Fig. 66 _a_, eggs from which the young are produced) which lives under the bark of trees in Europe, also produced young born alive.