THE SQUASH BUG
(Anasa tristis, De G.)
The smell of the squash bug is known to every country boy. The odor is emitted through openings in the abdomen from special stink glands, which vary with each species.
The tough external skeleton explains, perhaps, why no spray is strong enough to kill the fully grown insects without also injuring the young squash and pumpkin vines, and why the best method of prevention consists in screening the young plants with a wire screen until they have grown large enough to be immune from attack. If you can find the young insects which are not yet encased in such a hardened shell, spraying with a 10 per cent kerosene emulsion will stop up their breathing pores and asphyxiate them.
The one in the picture is an old specimen, preparing to go into winter quarters under the leaves and wait for the tender squash and pumpkin vines to appear above the ground next spring.
It is surprising how quickly they find these juicy shoots, which they pierce with their sucking beaks and upon which they lay the eggs which in a few days hatch out into a brood of small but voracious squash bugs.
A STRANGE-SHAPED BUG
(Euschistus tristigmus, Say)
A strange-shaped bug walked into the laboratory to have his picture taken, not willing, evidently, that he should be left out of the collection. The handbooks on entomology which I possess seem not to have heard of him. He is just a common, ordinary bug, but he, doubtless, has an interesting life for all our scorning of his acquaintance.
A QUEER, UNWORLDLY MONSTER
(Corynocoris distinctus, Dallas)
Could anything be more antediluvian and unworldly than this old, broken-down creature, with six crooked legs, a pair of popping-out eyes, two shining ocelli which look straight up into the air, and a long, stout beak that is partly hidden behind one of the fore legs?
A discussion of how such a fright of a thing came into existence leads one into the realms of evolutionary science, and there we should perhaps find it suggested that it is so ugly and looks so much like the bark of the trees on which it roosts that birds have passed its ancient forefather by, and through the weird workings of that little-understood law of heredity this thorny, spotted creature has waddled along year after year, keeping up in the race for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of centuries. I cannot help exhibiting a little of the showman’s pride in it; for, as Barnum would say, this is positively the first real appearance of this century-hidden, hoary monster before the everyday public.
According to the books, this species belongs to a strange family, in which are even more remarkable-looking creatures. They are all, however, characterized by having the femora of their back legs covered with knobs or spines. One of the species is so spiny all over its back that the male makes use of it to carry around the freshly laid eggs of the female.
THE THREAD-LEGGED BUG
(Emesa longipes, De G.)
When you consider how slight a jar of a spider’s web will bring its maker running swiftly across the web, it is interesting to be told that this thread-legged bug has the temerity to pick off insects from a spider’s web. It is plain that he stands on stilts, and with his powerful tong-like front legs, which end in spiny gripping hands, he must, I imagine, reach out across the web and pick the smaller insects from it, for he is much too small and weak and incredibly fragile to fight a spider on its own web.
Even to someone fairly familiar with the insect world he might easily be mistaken for a mantis, but his short, sharp beak, bent backwards under his chin, puts him among the bugs, where he takes his place beside the assassin bugs.
In one form of thread-legged bug in South America, it is said that the young larva is so long and slender that it curls itself around the mother’s body and is carried about with her, papoose-like, on her back.
THE ASSASSIN BUG
(Pselliopus cinctus, Fab.)
The human species puts its assassins into striped clothing and it is a rather curious coincidence to find in the insect world an assassin bug in convict’s stripes.
I think no visitor to our portrait gallery has seen a more fantastic being than this little bow-legged beast. Until I found out what he was, I could not understand his rank impertinence, for he stalked leisurely about as though afraid of nothing.
I wonder if he has a nasty flavor and advertises the fact by his curious coat.
AN ASSASSINATION
(Pselliopus cinctus, Fab.)
I once took a photograph, without realizing it, of some Arab women at the gates of Bagdad, trying to assassinate an old man; and I cannot pass the picture in my album without shuddering.
This photograph affects me in the same way, for it, too, is of a real tragedy and portrays the death of a ladybird, one of the few friends man has in the whole order of beetles, and that, too, at the hands of a member of the order of bugs, the most destructive order of our insect pests.
It must be admitted that, as things go in Nature, the ladybird has met her just fate, for she has spent her life devouring bugs, the sucking aphids and scale insects of our rose bushes and cherry trees. Somehow the old nursery rhyme of
“Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home,Your house is on fire, your children will burn,”
seems to have endeared to us all this beneficent little beetle which wanders everywhere, cutting short the lives of the sap-sucking insects that deform and injure our plants, and it does not seem to matter that this particular assassin bug preys upon our enemies as well as on our friends. To find this convict striped, spiny bug, with its beak buried to the base in the vitals of the ladybird, and realize that it had first poisoned its victim with poison saliva and was now sucking its blood, rouses a peculiar feeling of hatred towards this hideously ugly creature. Perhaps this is heightened by the contrast between the pretty, trim form of the ladybird and the ugliness of the assassin bug.
I was puzzled to know how a creature so nearly armor-clad could be successfully attacked by a soft-bodied bug of such deliberate habits of movement. How the start is made I do not know, but it is evident that between the base of the wing covers of the ladybird and her neck or thorax is a weak spot in her armor and the assassin thrusts his beak into this crack.
There are members of this assassin bug class which do not hesitate to attack little children in the South, and produce nasty wounds with their poisoned beaks.
THE CICADA
(Cicada sayi, Grossb.)
The coming of the swallow is scarcely more significant to Americans of the Southern states than the arrival of the cicada. Its song is the noisiest song in the insect world, and is made in a curious way, by the stretching and relaxing of a corrugated drum-like membrane in the side of the abdomen by means of specially strong muscles. The sound is controlled in rhythmic cadences by means of semicircular discs or covers to the drums, which can be closed and opened at the will of the insect.
This noisy song, which the male alone can sing, he doubtless sings for his mate and not for us, although entomologists are not agreed as to how his partner hears his song, as she seems to have no ears. Although this is the photograph of a two-year cicada the story can be told here of that weirdest of all the insects,—the Rip Van Winkle of the insect world, as David Sharp has called it,—the seventeen-year cicada.
From a tiny egg laid by its mother in a twig of your back-yard shrubbery there issues a creature which is as unlike this monster as it can be, with soft, white body and mole-like front legs. It hurries to the ground and disappears beneath its surface sometimes to a depth of a hundred times its length—twenty feet it is said. For seventeen years it digs its way around in the absolute darkness of this underworld, and then, as though by some prearranged agreement, it comes to the surface to join in a marriage revelry of a few brief weeks in summer with its kinsmen of the same generation who disappeared as it did into the darkness seventeen years before.
Most insects live for a few months only, and one, indeed, the male at least, for only fifteen or twenty minutes; but the seventeen-year cicada, the oldest of the insect world, lives as long as a cat or dog. But what a life! Seventeen years of it in the dark and a few weeks in the sunlight. And yet, compared to the life of an angleworm, condemned to the darkness forever, what an interesting career!
When the cicada’s shrill song disturbs you, then remember how brief is the pleasure of its existence.
THE AMBUSH BUG
(Phymata pennsylvanica, Handl.)
We are personally so afraid of a bee’s sting that it is hard for us to believe that any mere bug exists which is strong enough to overcome and kill a wasp or honey bee. A look at the thick armor of this creature and its powerful, black pointed beak will go a long way towards convincing one that this may be such a bug; it has a close relative, anyway, which does so. Its front legs have been developed into enormously strong claws with which to catch and hold its prey.
It lurks in flowers and preys on honey-sucking insects, and one can easily imagine the unequal struggle between it and a butterfly, or realize that it might come off victor in a fight with bees or wasps.
There are such romantic scenes and bloodcurdling spectacles to be observed in this world of insects that I cannot understand why there are so few who, having ample time, have not the patience to sit and watch them as Fabre and others less well known have done.
No schoolroom training in observation can compare in value with the outdoor observations of living insects. To look and wait and think and try to understand; what habits of observation, perseverance and reflection these actions cultivate!
A BUG THAT IS ALWAYS WALKING AROUND
(Brochymena arborea, Say)
No photograph in the collection illustrates better the marvelous variety of form which abounds in the jungle of our back yards. To the naked eye all the interesting details are invisible and one’s hand instinctively brushes the intruder from the table where it has crawled in to take a look at a human being.
The spotted, crablike legs, covered with bristles, the beadlike facet eyes, the oyster shell shaped body, the moving antennæ all covered with white scales, the curious trunk or sucking pipe descending from the chin, give to the creature a personality which combines something of the wistful with the curious. And yet this is, as my friend Dr. Schwartz says, “just one of those bugs that is always walking around on our plants and nobody seems to know just what it is doing.”
THE TARNISHED PLANT BUG
(Lygus pratensis, Linn.)
If you have ever carefully tended young vegetable plants, set them out by hand and watched over them, you will certainly have made the acquaintance of this vicious little creature a quarter of an inch long. At least you will have found where he drove his proboscis and sucked the juices from your tender plant, leaving his irritating fluids behind to distort the tissues of the leaf or bud. He lives in the rubbish which was left littering up the garden and is waiting now for spring to come when he will make his appearance and do whatever damage is necessary for his existence. You cannot spray him with kerosene for he is too agile, skipping away from you in the sunlight, but when his mate lays her eggs, and the young nymphs with wingless bodies crawl about, you can kill them with a dose of kerosene oil emulsion which will close their breathing pores and suffocate them.
THE LANTERN FLY BUG
(Helicoptera variegata, Van D.)
This creature belongs to the family of lantern flies and is also related to the little leaf hoppers which one startles from the grass by the hundred in walking across a lawn or meadow.
It is a small, grey bug, not a quarter of an inch long, and quite insignificant when looked at with the naked eye, yet it is quite as strange in form as any of the prehistoric monsters.
Its powerful beak is made up, as are the beaks of all the great order of sucking insects, of four hairlike bodies, four fine, flexible, closely connected rods enclosed in a narrow groove and sharp enough to puncture the skin of a succulent young plant. Not only are these hairlike rods as sharp as needles, but the outer pair are usually barbed so that, once introduced, a hold is easily maintained.
Under the throat is an organ of the nature of a force pump which injects an irritating fluid into the plant. It is supposed that this gives rise to an irritation or congestion of the plant tissue, and thus keeps up a supply of liquid food for the bug at the point operated upon, which, rising by capillary attraction along the grooved rods, finds its way into the stomach of the insect.
That these leaf-sucking insects inject a poison is shown by the way in which the punctured leaves curl up, turn brown and die.
THE BEETLES
(Coleoptera)
Beetles are distinguished from the other orders of flying creatures by having the first pair of wings changed into shells under which the other pair can be safely folded and laid away. You can usually recognize them when they spread their wings to fly, for they have to raise their wing covers in order to do so. Also they generally have prominent jaws, as they are biting creatures and do not suck the juices of plants and animals as the bugs do.
Beetles are almost everywhere. You cannot turn over a stone or break down a stump or roll over a log without disturbing some of them, and yet perhaps less is known about the lives of beetles than about those of any other of the great orders of insects.
They lead two lives, distinct as two lives can be: one in the form of a grub, the other as a full-grown beetle. To make the transformation, they burrow into the ground or into the wood of trees and but rarely make for themselves silken cocoons such as the butterfly larvæ spin.
They do not lead so aerial an existence as some other orders, but, nevertheless, they are today, perhaps because of their closely fitting outer shells, the predominant order of insects of the present epoch and already there are known the bewildering number of 150,000 species. In North America alone (Mexico excepted) 12,000 species have been described and these have been grouped into eighty families and 2,000 genera. The general public is beginning to realize that not everyone can be an entomologist, and that the quality of brains and training required before one can travel safely among this maze of forms and distinguish between the friends and foes of our agriculture is a quality of the greatest value to mankind.
So far as man is concerned, this gigantic class of creatures is among the most destructive with which we divide life on this planet, and though there are beetle friends which help us by preying on other beetles and by making humus out of leaves and twigs, and by feeding millions of our song birds, yet, as a whole, they represent a restless, armored multitude which perhaps we should be just as well without.
THE JUNE BEETLE
(Allorhina nitida, Linn.)
In looking at these two strange beings (this picture and the next), we cannot feel confident that science has gone very far in giving us the reasons for the things we see. They seem no more alike than fish and tortoise or bird and quadruped and yet, before our very eyes, in one brief year, the one turns into the other.
This beetle dies, and leaves behind a hundred little cells, parts of its own body and the body of its mate. These paired cells, the fertilized eggs, grow rapidly into the form of the clumsy, helpless grub which feeds upon the leaves, only to break up and form themselves again into this armor-plated creature of the beetle world.
There must be something as radically wrong with our individualistic ideas of today as there was with the conception of a flat world which prevailed before the time of Columbus. Perhaps if we stop trying to think of these manifestations of beetle life as individuals and think of them as parts of one great organism scattered over the surface of the earth, these striking differences will seem no stranger to us than do the differences in the various stages of a flower’s life. The beetle forms inside the grub and the tulip flower bud forms inside the bulb. If tulip flowers could fly, we should then have the strange spectacle of the opening of the scale-covered tulip bulb and the coming forth of the gorgeous colored flower which sailed away to shed its seeds in someone else’s garden. I think that this is the way we must look at it if we would get a clear idea of this strangest of phenomena,—metamorphosis.
THE JUNE BEETLE LARVA
(Allorhina nitida, Linn.)
How is it possible that this fat creature, with eye-like breathing pores along its body, whose legs are worthless, and which is so helpless that it has to turn over on its back to wriggle over the ground, can change into the emerald-green June beetle which wings its way like an aerodrome across the meadow? This is the apparent miracle of metamorphosis which it has well-nigh baffled the intellect of man to explain.
Though the reasons for it are still unknown, modern research has shown us how this incredible change has taken place.
When this creature, which has grown a hundred times its size since it was born, has reached the age for this great change, it doubtless feels the impending transformation coming, and instinct tells it to crawl away into some protected nook or corner and pupate underneath the protection of a silken coverlid of its own spinning.
The change begins; each organ goes to pieces, disintegrates, becomes a mass of disconnected cells, so that the body filled with these, becomes, as it were, a bag of mush. This mushy fluid has been likened by entomologists to the disintegrated tissues which inflammation causes in our own bodies. If, then, you should slit it open at this stage, you would find no alimentary canal, no salivary glands, no muscles, simply a thick fluid, with here and there a thicker lump, that is attached at certain places to the inside of the sac wall. These lumps are formed of groups of active cells which were not disintegrated in the general breakdown of the muscle tissue, and these form the nuclei around which the new creature is to be built. These groups of cells grow rapidly, feeding on the fluid mass of broken-down tissue much as a young chick inside the egg feeds on the yolk, and builds up the whole complicated structure of the winged beetle, which seems to have no possible relations to the white grub out of whose body it was made.
It is as though the insect hatched twice, first from the almost microscopic egg its mother laid and from which it emerged as a tiny little creature in the image of this grub, growing and manufacturing from the leaves it eats enough nitrogenous matter so that when it emerges again from the yolk-like substance of its cocoon it will be a full-grown beetle, for it must be remembered that once made the beetle never grows.
This wonderful process is the same which is gone through by every flying insect that has a grub or caterpillar stage.
ONE OF THE JUNE BUGS OR MAY BEETLES
(Lachnosterna quercus, Knoch)
Of the wild creatures of our back yards, none is better known than this hard-shelled buzzing creature, which whirs into the circle of light around your lamp and commits suicide, if you will let it, by flying into the flame.
It is one of the so-called June bugs, or May beetles, which every boy and girl knows, and is not the Junebeetleof which the larva was shown previously.
Its hard, pitted skeleton covers it completely, and it is most interesting to watch it open its wing covers with great deliberation, unfold the wings which are carefully stowed away beneath them, and holding its wing covers elevated so they will not interfere, start the transparent wings into motion and fly away with the whir of a miniature aerodrome. Indeed, it was this resemblance which caused the members of the Aerial Experiment Association to name one of their first aerodromes after it, and the first trophy ever given for an aerodrome flight was won by Curtis’s “June Bug.”
This creature’s first life is spent beneath the sod of your lawn, where it curls up around the roots of the grasses and clover and other plants which you do not want it to eat, and the first year of its subterranean existence it is the white grub, with the brown head, which everybody knows. At the end of the second summer of its life it changes to a soft brown beetle, which throughout the winter is hardening its shell preparatory to coming out in late spring as a winged creature to feed upon the leaves of trees. The beetle which is walking toward you lives upon the oak.
ONE OF THE TWIG-PRUNERS
(Elaphidion atomaricum, Dru.)
The long-horned beetles, as they are called, are remarkable for the length of their antennæ and for their eyes of many facets, which almost encircle the antennæ at their base. They have, like other beetles, two lives, so to speak, and their grub-life is spent inside some twig or branch, burrowing and living on the juices which their stomachs extract from the sawdust made by their jaws. They kill the twig they burrow in, so that the wind blows it to the ground, and they go through their transformation on the ground. The story is told of a long-horned beetle, belonging to a different species, that lived for years in its larval stage, burrowing patiently into the dry wood of a boot-last or shoe-stretcher, trying vainly to get enough nourishment out of it to make a beetle of itself.
THE PREDACEOUS GROUND BEETLE
(Chlænius æstivus, Say)
This creature almost anyone will recognize as a beetle. It is built for running, and its jaws are made for fighting. You have only to catch one and watch it open and shut its jaws to realize that it would bite you if it could. But for all that it is a great friend, for it is what the entomologists call predaceous, and at night or at twilight it hunts everywhere for the larvæ of insects which attack the plants we live on. In its larval state, in which it looks for all the world like a centiped without the “ped,” it burrows in the ground in search of the plant destroyers, which think to escape notice by getting under the cover of the soil. It is by nature, then, opposed to the vegetarians, the herbivores, and hunts them wherever they are likely to occur.
When you see a black or dark-brown beetle running swiftly from under some stone or log whirls you have just turned over and which makes faces with its jaws as though it would chew your fingers when you pick it up, you can be quite sure in eight times out of ten that it is one of these carabidæ or predaceous ground beetles, and if you let it drop from your fingers you may be saving the life of a friend, because some day it may eat the worm which, lying close to some pet flower of yours, had planned to cut it off beneath the ground.
It is one of the hardest things in all the world to understand how balanced is this scale of foe and friend. One year there is a wiping out of our insect friends through frost or floods or microscopic disease, and, freed thus from the check which kept their numbers down, the foes to our plants can multiply to such an extent that nothing we can do will save our crops from total failure. Next year, perhaps, the parasitic beetle, finding such a wealth of food to live upon, increases and holds well in check the pest which last year ate up all our plants. Each wave of insect pests could be explained, no doubt, if all the facts were known, and nowadays no one who knows what modern agriculture means will fail to reckon on the risks from losses caused by these pests.
THE CLOVER LEAF WEEVIL
(Phytonomus punctatus, Fab.)
Could anyone suspect this modest antediluvian creature coming toward you out of the gloom, hanging his head, as it were, of any designs against anyone? He has them, however, and if you will examine your clover leaves in June you will find them scalloped with irregular patches eaten out of them. It would be easy for him to prove an alibi, since it is his other self, his larval existence, which does it and does it at night, too, coming up out of the base of the clover plant where it hides during the daytime. Occasionally in August he can himself be seen feeding on the clover leaves. In his two existences he manages to do a good deal of damage to the clover fields of the farmer, necessitating the plowing up of old fields when he becomes too numerous.
But let us look at the company he keeps. He is in the same class with the alfalfa weevil which came over from central Asia recently and spread through the alfalfa fields of Utah, threatened the alfalfa growers with ruin and set the Entomological Bureau of the Government out on the trail of some parasite, some enemy of his which they were sure must have held him in check in his native land. If you could have heard the conferences which were held and the drastic measures relating to traffic which were proposed you would realize that it is no child’s play to fight the Asiatic relative of this modest-looking creature.
But it has in this country worse relatives even than the alfalfa weevil. It is related to the cotton boll weevil, which has brought thousands of families in the South to the point of starvation and drawn millions of dollars from the federal treasury of the country in an effort to fight it and lessen its ravages throughout the cotton belt of the Southern states. Thousands of lectures are being given to tell the farmers what its habits are and how it can be prevented.
It has other more distant relatives which live in the forest trees and make wonderful burrows which look like hieroglyphics. As that remarkable entomologist, Hubbard, discovered, they are cultivators of microscopic mushrooms as wonderful as those of the mushroom nests of the atta ants or the termites of the tropics. Incidentally, and this is the important point, they kill the trees, fires start in the dead trees, and it is estimated roughly by Dr. Hopkins, the Forest Entomologist, that they destroy over a hundred million dollars’ worth of timber annually or, at least, are one of the principal causes of this gigantic loss.
THE SPOTTED VINE CHAFER IN FLIGHT
(Pelidnota punctata, Linn.)
How often one sees lame butterflies limping along in their flight, because their wings have been injured by the rose bushes or by striking against the pine needles or have been nipped by some hungry bird. The beetles, when they alight, carefully fold up each delicate wing, close down over them polished covers as hard almost as steel and fitting as closely as the engine covers of an automobile. Whether these wing covers act as aeroplanes or as rudders for the beetles when in flight is as yet unknown. There are strange, almost microscopic, markings over the surface of these wing covers and in some species there are glands inside them which secrete a fluid which reaches the surface through minute pores, but the use of this fluid we are still unable to discover.
It seems likely that the discovery, if we may so term it, of these wing-protecting shells, has been of tremendous advantage to the class of organisms where it first appeared. At any rate, among the insects the order of beetles (Coleoptera) is the predominating one of this epoch.
When one thinks that man has just begun to fly, whereas the beetles flew perhaps a hundred million years or more ago, these wings and their most perfect chitinized wing covers are deserving of our wonder and of our admiration, too.
This light, yellowish brown and black spotted beetle prefers the leaves of the grape vine to those of any other plant, and in its grub life it burrows in rotten wood, especially in decaying roots of apple, pear and hickory trees.
ONE OF THE BLISTER OR CANTHARIDES BEETLES
(Epicanta marginata, Fab.)
I can never look at this beetle without a feeling of emotion, for in a desperate struggle to escape from the fate predestined by a bald-headed ancestry, I once submitted to the treatment of a noted hair specialist and allowed him to apply to my scalp the acrid oil of the blister beetle. And the melancholy part is that it did no good.
Fabre has described how the female European blister beetle lays a thousand or two eggs in the ground in close proximity to the nest of the solitary bee whose eggs form the only food of the blister beetle larva. From the beetles’ eggs hatch out strong-jawed, six-legged spiny larvæ called triangulins. Although born close to the nests of the bees, which in this case are in the ground, these triangulins do not enter the nests, but attempt to attach themselves to any hairy object which may come near, much as burrs attach themselves to the wool of sheep.
A certain number of them by merest chance, apparently, succeed in getting onto the bodies of the bees and are carried by them to their nests. As the male bees, in this particular species, appear a month before the female, it seems probable, Fabre thinks, that the vast majority of triangulins attach themselves at first to the males and later, when a chance occurs, discovering their mistake, transfer themselves onto the females and so get carried to the underground cells, and are present when the mother bee fills the cell with honey and then lays an egg which floats around on top.
There is something ghastly in the picture of the mother bee laying her single egg, with the blister beetle larva on her back waiting till the last moment in order to slip unexpectedly from her body to the egg, on which it floats in the honey as on a raft. When the unsuspecting bee has closed in her unborn child, the hideous monster which is perched on top of it eats it up. This takes eight days, and when it has eaten up its raft, the triangulin moults and becomes, as it were, an aquatic creature with breathing pores so placed that it can float on the honey, and with a stomach so changed that it can be nourished by it. In about eight more days the honey is consumed and the final moult takes place.
A HIPPOPOTAMUS AMONG THE INSECTS
(Prionus sp.)
Why beetles as large as elephants never came into existence on this planet, or have they developed on some other of the countless worlds of space, are questions too hard for us to answer.
This wonderfully protected creature with long horn-like antennæ and hippopotamus-like jaws is a relative of the largest of the beetles, those which live in the great forests along the Amazon or in the tropical jungles of the Fijian Islands, and whose grubs are good to eat. Some years ago, in a clearing in a New Zealand forest, a Maori dug out several handfuls of the white wriggling creatures for me and a settler’s wife fried them with butter over the fire in her kitchen stove, and I can testify that they were as crisp and delicate as fried oysters.
Like the other giant creatures of the forest, these Prionids, as they are called, are growing rarer with the destruction of the forest trees on which they live, and some day their skeletons in museum cases may be all that remain of them.
These long-horned wood borers do not themselves bore into the wood; how could they with their long antennæ? It is their other selves, their grubs, that live deep in the solid heart wood of some oak or hickory tree. There is something strange in their solitary hermit-cell life. Think of living for two years or more in a narrow hole which shuts you in on all sides and having for a steady diet the walls of your cell to feed upon. Prisoners have burrowed under prison stockades to escape, but these larvæ deliberately leave the outer, softer sapwood in which they hatch, and start for the interior of the trunk, packing behind them with sawdust and excrement the tunnel which they eat out.
The fact that the grubs of some species of these Prionids choose to live in the roots and trunks of trees which we choose to cultivate makes them our enemies, and every good orchardist knows that the only way to stop them is to dig them out or stab them with a wire run through them in their burrows.
This fellow bit savagely at a pencil, and when he finally caught hold, I lifted him up as one does a bull dog, and he hung there almost as long.
ONE OF THE LONGICORN BEETLES
(Orthosoma brunneum, Forst.)
At first glance this longhorn might pass for a Prionus, but its antennæ are very different and the shape of its broad collar or prothorax is not the same. To a trained eye they could never be confused, which cannot be said of all beetles! In fact there is perhaps no group of living organisms which scientific men have more difficulty in classifying than the beetles, unless it be the lichens on the stones and trees. Their differences are so minute and their grub lives so obscure that they have sometimes to be bred in order to determine their relationships.
AN AMERICAN SCARAB
(Copris carolina, Linn.)
I cannot help wondering what one of the priests of ancient Egypt would think of this picture of a New World relative of his sacred scarab. To me there has always been something strangely beautiful in the veneration which the great Egyptian race has shown for thousands of years towards the humble, industrious beetle which spends its life in the droppings from Egyptian cattle.
Go to Gizeh, and look at the images of the scarab beetle carved from the rarest stories the lapidary could find, mounted in the loveliest gold settings he could fashion, and reflect that the ladies of the court wore these dung beetles around their necks and were buried with them on.
Was this veneration of the scarab as old, almost, as the race, and did it come with the race into its civilization, or did it arise as the whim of some great Pharaoh?
It is said that somewhere with this veneration there was included a symbolism. The living scarab is a tumble bug, the female makes a ball of dung much larger than herself and either with her shovel pointed nose, or else standing on her head with her hind legs on the ball, she either pushes or pulls the ball along until she finds some suitable place in which to dig a hole and bury this ball so that later she may consume it at her ease. It has been suggested that some Egyptian astronomer, watching the rolling ball, may have suggested an analogy with the movement of the heavenly bodies—with the traveling of the moon around the earth. For we must not forget that in those days the wonder of the heavens was fresh and new and the idea of world-balls of matter was a subject of intense intellectual excitement.
But there was yet another reason for the veneration of the Egyptians. The fact that these beetles suddenly disappeared into the ground and that later they appeared again was taken as proof of a future life.
It seems to me that we can take a lesson from the ancient Egyptians and see in things as insignificant as the beetles of manure the greatness of the world of change and really feel the wonder of it all.
It is a pity, but I have to admit that this American species is not a “tumble bug,” but contents herself with digging holes, filling them with manure and laying her eggs on it, instead of rolling a well-made ball to some special place as her Egyptian cousin does.
The mother scarab, unlike every other beetle, lives to see her children grow up, indeed she produces two families of little scarabs.