37-t 



THE GUIDE TO NATURE 



fly of the species which is there called 

 "Cucuyo." This has a steady light, 

 which he held two inches from the 

 paper. He says further that in the 

 Orient there are undetermined glow- 

 worms of considerable brilliancy that 

 may be wingless females, and have a 

 much brighter light than the flying 

 males. In such case the, female is us- 

 ually constantly and brilliantly lumi- 

 nous while the male shows only a dim 

 ligrht or none. "As the habitat of such 

 species is usually very circumscribed 

 it would not be at all strange that their 

 luminosity should be known only to 

 the peasant or farmer class whose na- 

 tural history lore, true or false, is too 

 seldom recorded." 



In a somewhat extended correspon- 

 dence Mr. Van Norden writes as fol- 

 lows : 



"Again referring to your inquiry re- 

 garding the glowworm story, I have 

 found it repeated in 'Social Life of the 

 Chinese' by Justice Doolittle, page 359, 

 published in London by Sampson, Low 

 Sons & Marston, 1868. 



"It seems the young man's name was 

 Che yin. He lived in the Dynasty of 

 Tsyn, 265—4918 A. D. Dr. Doolittle's 

 story states that the worms were in a 

 gauze bag. He adds that Che yin be- 

 came President of one of the six 

 boards." 



In another letter he says : "I have 

 just heard of another book which con- 

 tains the story of the glowworms. I 

 have put in application for it to a lib- 

 rary and as soon as I receive it, I shall 

 write you again, quoting you the page 

 on which the story appears." 



A letter to the Chinese embassy in 

 Washington has not been answered, 

 but request has been made that cor- 

 respondence be taken up with some 

 Chinese entomologist. We shall be 

 glad if any of our readers can throw 

 further light on the subject, which at 

 present seems rather dim in the distant 

 past and in the somewhat indefinite 

 form of the information. 



Five Years of Starvation of Larvae. 



BY J. E. WODSEDAEEK, UNIVERSITY OF 

 IDAHO, MOSCOW, IDAHO- 



The specimens concerned are the larvae 

 of Trogoderma tarsale, a small beetle 

 well known as a museum pe-t. The 

 last of a large number of specimens 

 lived, without a particle to eat, for the 

 surprisingly long period of five years, 



The Welch National Museum has 

 just acquired a natural history collec- 

 tion in which the swallow-tail butter- 

 flies alone number over three thousand 

 specimens and the beetles more than 

 forty thousand. 



LARVAE IN VARIOUS STAGES OF GROWTH. 



one month and twenty-nine days or, to 

 be more specific, from October 28, 191 1, 

 to December 25, 1916, a period of 1,884 

 days. The case is decidedly outstand- 

 ing, as to my knowledge, nothing simi- 

 lar has ever been recorded as a result of 

 starvation experiments with other ani- 

 mals. It is very probable that under 

 otherwise non-disturbing conditions 

 the starving larvae would have lived 

 for even a longer period. The speci- 

 mens concerned in this article had un- 

 dergone considerable disturbance after 

 the first two years of starvation, since 

 many of the larvae made the trip be- 

 tween Idaho and Wisconsin with me 

 three or four times, and several of them 

 covered the distance five times. The 

 trips one way varied in duration from 

 four to seven days. There is no doubt 

 but that the jarring of the train had 

 accelerated the metabolism of the 

 larvae. This fact was evinced by the 

 moulting of practically every individual 

 toward the end of the trip or within a 

 few days after it, and by the decided 

 decrease in the dimensions of the 

 larvae immediately following such a 

 moult. Larvae placed under starvation 

 shortly after my arrival in Idaho in the 

 summer of 1913, which have not been 

 so disturbed, show indications of even 



