210 THE BIOLOGY OF INSECTS 



of as much as five feet in some cases. The female does the 

 digging with her strong fore-limbs, while the male hoists 

 the displaced soil to the surface, a work in which the three 

 sharp processes on his prothorax prove of much use by 

 holding the fragments of earth. He then collects sheep- 

 dung, which in the upper part of the tunnel he works into 

 pellets with his thoracic spines and front legs, breaks into 

 large fragments, and lets fall to the lower part of the tunnel 

 where the female reduces these fragments to a fine state of 

 division and arranges them in the form of a *' sausage " or 

 ** long cylindrical loaf." The egg is laid a short distance 

 below the food-mass, to reach which the grub after hatching 

 " will have to demolish and pass through a ceiling of sand 

 some millimetres thick." 



From such provision of food-supply by father and 

 mother for their young, we may pass to actual care for the 

 family after hatching as well as for the eggs. This is illus- 

 trated by the habits of our Common Earwig {Forficula 

 auricularia) and other members of the same lowly family. 

 More than a century and a half ago C. De Geer (1773) 

 observed the female of the Common Earwig brooding over 

 her eggs, and M. T. Goe (1925) has lately stated that the 

 eggs will not hatch unless this incubation has been practised. 

 The incubation period lasts for about a fortnight, and after 

 hatching, the young earwigs are often tended for some time 

 by their apparently careful mother. A pleasing sight is pre- 

 sented to the naturalist, lifting a partly sunken stone beside 

 a hedgerow in winter or spring, by a female earwig with 

 her eggs or her tiny pale youngsters, already strikingly like 

 her in general aspect, but with the forceps-limbs relatively 

 slender and weak. The larger shore-hunting earwig 

 Anisolahis maritima has, according to C. B. Bennett (1904), 

 similar breeding habits. The female, in preparation for 

 egg-laying, hollows out beneath a log or stone, a " little 

 chamber " an inch wide and half as deep, carrying away the 

 excavated soil between her jaws. '' The chamber is made 

 perfectly clean ; no sticks or bits of wood or pebbles are 

 allowed by the more careful females to remain." The eggs 



