MELOLONTHID^ — COCK-CHAFERS. 41 



is essential to appease the demon whose intervention has 

 been invoked. Hence the discomfort of a Singhalese on 

 finding a beetle in his house after sunset, and his anxiety 

 I to expel but not kill it."^ 



The Dynastes Goliathus, Moufet says, "like to beetles 

 (Ateuchus sacer), hath no female, but it shapes its own 

 form itself. It produceth its young one from the ground 

 by itself, which Joach. Camerarius did elegantly express, 

 when he sent to Pennius the shape of this insect out of the 

 storehouse of natural things of the Duke of Saxony ; with 

 these verses : 



A bee begat me not, nor yet did I proceed 

 From any female, but myself I breed. 



For it dies once in a year," continues Moufet, "and from its 

 own corruption, like a Phoenix, it lives again (as Moninus 

 witnesseth) by heat of the sun. 



A thousand summers' heat and winters' cold 

 When she hath felt, and that she doth grow old, 

 Her life that seems a burden, in a tomb 

 0' spices laid, comes younger in her room."^ 



Melolonthidse — Cock-chafers, 



The family of insects, commonly called Cock-chafers, 

 Hedge-chafers, May-bugs, and Dorrs (from the Irish 

 dord, humming, buzzing, or from the Anglo-Saxon dora, 

 a locust or drone) have been included by Fabricius in the 

 genus Melolonlha, — a word which retains an odd notion of 

 the Greeks respecting them, viz., that they were produced 

 from or with the flowers of apple-trees. It is a name 

 also by which the Greeks themselves used to distinguish 

 the same kind of insects. 



In Sweden the peasants look upon the grub of the Cock- 

 chafer, Melolontha vulgaiHs, as furnishing an unfailing 

 prognostic whether the ensuing winter will be mild or 

 severe ; if the animal have a bluish hue (a circumstance 



1 Tennent, Nat. Hist, of Ceylon, p. 407. 



2 Theatr. Ins., p. 152. Topsel's Hist, of Beasts, p. 1009. 



