INSECTS 



a little: none of them bother with such small fry as 

 plant lice and scale insects and their cannibalistic 

 habits do much to limit their usefulness. 



In the series of rove-beetles or Staphylinidao , which 

 are scavengers as a rule, there are many small species 

 that are predaceous, and what a battle goes on between 

 these and other breeders in or among damp, decaying 

 vegetation we can only guess when, with a sieve, we 

 collect out of a handful of forest leaves sometimes a 

 dozen species of adult beetles and hundreds of minute 

 larvae and wriggling creatures of 

 all sorts. The collector who cov- 

 ers a dozen miles in a day and at 

 night has a box of butterflies, 

 beetles and other insects to show 

 for it, has seen much; but he has 

 seen nothing of the intimate life 

 of insects as compared with the 

 man who has spent the same 

 period in an open glade in a 

 deciduous wood. It is not in the 

 open air and on the surface that 

 the most interesting matters are to be observed; it is 

 under the shelter of fallen leaves, in the very centre 

 of a decaying stump or log, or beneath a stone and 

 sometimes deep in the very soil that insect life man- 

 ifests itself in its most wonderful ways. It means 

 patient watching and persistent study to unravel all 

 these mysterious happenings that come to our atten- 

 tion, and it is because we have not yet done enough 

 of this, that we know so very little about these rove- 

 beetles and their minute allies; but we do know that 

 they are not all scavengers at any rate. 



Among the Coccinellidce popularly known as "lady- 

 birds," "ladybird beetles" or simply "ladybugs," 



Fig. 46. — A rove-beetle 

 and its larva. 



