120 THE CHURCHYARD BEETLE. 



length, wearied apparently with this incessant labour, he came 

 forth and laid his head upon the earth beside the bird, without 

 the smallest motion, for a full hour, as if to rest; then again 

 crept under the earth. The next day, in the morning, the 

 bird was an inch and a half below the surface of the ground, 

 and the trench remaining open ; the corpse seemed as if laid 

 out upon a bier, surrounded by a rampart of mould. In the 

 evening it had sunk half an inch lower, and in another day 

 the work was completed, and the bird covered. Other dead 

 animals being added, the four beetles, in fifty days, interred no 

 less than twelve bodies in the narrow cemetery allotted for 

 their work."* 



Of a sepulchral character in unison with the above, but of 

 associations much more gloomy as connected with ourselves, 

 is the beetle of the churchyard, t our proposed pattern for a 

 vane on the Exchange. 



This dark, ill-favoured, ill-scented, and, in the eye of supersti- 

 tion, ill-omened insect whose proper name (Blaps mortisagd] 

 savours of mortality as strongly as its common, though not 

 popular appellation is one of those creeping things from which 

 whenever, in its favourite haunt, it happens to cross our path, 

 we turn instinctively away, even as we are wont with other, the 

 like mementos, come they in what shape they may. 



" To smell to a turf of fresh earth/' savs an old writer. " is 



v * 



" M. Gleditsch, quoted by Kirby aud Spcnee ; also in ' Insect Architecture.' 

 f JSlaps mortisaga. See Vignette. 



