CYNIPS, in zoology, a genus of insects belonging to the hymenoptera order. The mouth is armed with jaws, but has no proboscis: the sting is spiral, and mostly concealed within the body. The quecus folii, or oak-leaf cynips, is of a burnished shining brown colour. The antennæ are black; the legs and feet of a chestnut-brown; and the wings white, but void of marginal spots. It is in the little smooth, round, hard galls, found under the oak-leaves, generally fastened to the fibres, that this insect is produced, a single one in each gall. These latter are ligneous, of a hard compact
Cynoscephalus substance, formed like the rest, by the extravasation of the sap of the leaf, occasioned by the puncture of the gall-fly when it deposits its eggs. Sometimes, instead of the cynips, there is seen to proceed from the gall a larger insect of a brown colour, which is an ichneumon. This ichneumon is not the real inmate of the gall, or he that formed it. He is a parasite, whose mother deposited her egg in the yet tender gall; which, when hatched, brings forth a larva that destroys the larva of the cynips, and then comes out when it has undergone its metamorphosis and acquired its wings.
Cynoscephalus the quercus gemme, or oak-bud cynips, is of a very dark green, slightly gilded: its antennæ and feet are of a dun colour, rather deep. It deposits its eggs in the oak buds, which produces one of the finest galls, leafed like a rose-bud beginning to blow. When the gall is small, that great quantity of leaves is compressed, and they are set one upon another like the tiles of a roof. In the centre of the gall there is a kind of ligneous kernel, in the middle of which is a cavity; and in that is found the little larva, who feeds there, takes its growth, undergoes its metamorphosis, and breaks through the inclosure of that kind of cod in order to get out. The whole gall is often near an inch in diameter, sometimes more when dried and displayed; and it holds to a branch by a pedicle.
There are a great number of other species.