insects: their ears and eyes. 161 



or rather with her jaws at its tip, as with a gimlet, bored 

 a tiny hole through the yielding shell into the very in- 

 terior ; then, turning round, and inserting the extremity 

 of her abdomen, with its ovipositor, she had shot an egg 

 into this dark cavity. The juices poured forth at the 

 wound soon healed the orifice ; the nut grew ; and pre- 

 sently the egg became a little Avhite grub. He then 

 rioted in plenty ; prolonged his darkling feast 



" From night to morn, from morn to dewy eve.;" 



— 'twas all " dewy eve " to him, by the way, for no ray of 

 light saw he, till that prosperous condition of existence 

 was done. Xo wonder he grew fat ; and fat those rogues 

 of nut-weevils always are, as you well know. Well, 

 when the nut fell, in October, the kernel was all gone, 

 completely devoured, and our little highway-robber was 

 ready for his winter sleep ; he gnawed a fresh hole 

 through the now hard shell, made his way out, and 

 immediately burrowed into the earth, where he lay till 

 June ; then became a pupa, and emerged just what you 

 see him, a long- snouted beetle like his mother, in the 

 beginning of August. 



Such is his " short eventful history ; " and you now 

 see that the long beak is formed entirely with reference 

 to this economy : it is an auger, fitted to bore holes into 

 shell-fruits, through their envelopes, for the reception of 



eggs. 



There is a very extensive family of Beetles known as 

 Lamellicomes, because the antennal joints are singularly 

 flattened, and applied one over the other, like the leaves 

 of a book (lamella, a leaf). Here is a very common little 

 €hafer found on the droppings in pastures (Aphodius 

 Jimetarius), in which the last three joints, constituting the 

 -club of the antenna, are of an ovate form, and flattened, 

 so as to lie one on another quite close, like three oval 



M 



