of the Oil Beetle, Meloé, and of the Strepsiptera. 351 
examination of near objects, the function specially required for the peculiar 
habits of the animal. 
When located in the cell, which the careful parent-bee closes in to protect 
her young,—unconscious of the danger she has herself introduced,—the para- 
sites, Meloé and Stylops, are very similar in their earlier changes and habits. 
The Stylops, as we have seen, penetrates into the body of the bee-larva, feeds 
on its substance, loses its organs of locomotion, then become utterly useless to 
it, and there undergoes its transformations. The Meloé, I have now reason to 
believe, also attacks the larva, while its organs of locomotion, as in Stylops, 
gradually become atrophied, and towards the end of its larva-state (Tas. XIV. 
figs. 15, 16) preparatory to its assuming the condition of a nymph (figs. 17, 18), 
bave almost disappeared, being then reduced to simple tubercles. But here 
the analogies between Stylops and Meloé cease. The organization and habits 
of the latter, in its perfect state, are widely different from those of the former. 
The changes which the structures in the larva of Meloé undergo are in some 
parts carried to a greater extent than in corresponding parts of Stylops, and 
to a less in others, and the habits of the perfect insect as a consequence are 
different. From a parasitical (figs. 4, 5) the Meloé becomes a vegetable feeder 
(figs. 1,2). The structure of the organs of nutrition are gradually altered in 
form during the growth of the larva (figs. 8, 10c,11); and when this has changed 
to the nymph, and afterwards to the imago state, the parts of its mouth are then 
adapted only for the prehension and comminution of vegetable food. 
In my former memoir, some observations on a larva (fig. 34, u) that seemed 
to be the middle stage of growth of that of Meloé, and which also I had found 
in the nest of Anthophora (fig. 19), led me then to the conclusion that the 
young Meloé fed only on the food stored up for the bee-larva, and conse- 
quently, that its parasitism was on vegetable and not on animal matter *, 
* Nore on Cryptophagus cellaris. (Read April 6th, 1847 3 
In my first memoir on Melo, read to the Linnean Society on the 18th of November 1845, I men 
tioned a larva of some coleopterous insect of which I had found three specimens, in a cell that Filii 
also a nymph of Anthophora, amidst others in the same bank of earth from which I obtained the full 
