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In the Philippine islands at the other end of the insects limit 

 American enterprise brought to bear on the backward agriculture, 

 turned the light on to it ; and of the coconut groves, heavily grassed 

 over and full of fruitless trees, Mr. C. S. Banks said, in 1906, that he 

 found scarcely a tree not marked by its ravages. 



From the latter's pen and from that of Mr. C. C. Ghosh, Assis- 

 tant to the Imperial Entomologist, A,gricultural Research Institute, 

 Pusa, India, have come new studies of the life history and manner of 

 working of the insect. 



The insect is too familiar to need any description, but there are 

 still several points in its life history, whose obscurity will be brought 

 out by the following paragraphs. 



The mature beetle is noctural, generally shunning light and very 

 anxious to hide when exposed to daylight. Ridley (Report on the 

 Destruction of Coconut Palms by Beetles, Journ. Asiatic Society, 

 Straits Branch, No. 20, 1889) says that the insects may be attracted to 

 fires lit in the plantations by night ; and Ghose states that they fly 

 to light in Behar, in the Ganges valley, and suggests that they may be 

 trapped by light traps ; but others have concluded that lights have not 

 influence enough on the beetle to be worth using. At night both 

 sexes fly abroad in search of food and in search of each other. By 

 preference they do not fly far. Both sexes for the purpose of feeding 

 alight in the tops of coconut palms and other palmsl ; there they 

 seek the softest spots and commence to burrow with their powerful 

 mandibles. After half an hour's work they are about one quarter of 

 an inch into the tissues ; at dawn they have penetrated at least more 

 than their own considerable body-length. Young palms, which are 

 growing fast and so expose a greater length of rather soft tissue than 

 do the old palms are on this account more exposed to attack ; per- 

 haps also, they are more attacked because their soft parts lie in the 

 still damp air near the ground, whence the beetle may have emerged 

 and whither, if female, it probably will go to lay eggs. The beetle 

 chews the tissues as it burrows swallowing the juice but ejecting 

 from its jaws the fibrous parts. At first it burrows chiefly for the 

 sake of a lair, but as it wants fresh food throughout its life, it continues 

 its tunnel to feed. It is a matter of chance in what direction the 

 tunnel goes ; if by chance it reaches to the centre of the growing 

 apex of the stem, the tree is killed ; again if the hole so lies open 

 that rain water gets into it rot sets in and again the tree is killed. 

 But fortunately for the most part the beetle finds food enough in the 

 young leaves enwrapping the apical bud, and by boring transversely 

 through these, tangentially to the apical bud, cuts them while 

 folded so that on emerging from the bud they appear as trimmed, 



t The following palms are recorded as attacked by the Rhinoceros beetle :— 

 Cocos tiiicifera—the Coconut, Cocos plumosa, Martinezia caryotirfolia, Phoenix dactylifera— 

 the Date palm, Phceiiix syhestn's, Livistona chinensis, Verschaffcltia spleiidida, Dictyosperma 

 album. Hyophorhe amaricauUs, Etaeis gnhicriisis—the African oil palm, Corypha umbraailifera — 

 the Talipot palm, Corypha Gchanga. Borassus flabcUiformis. 



