18 CURIOSITIES OF ENTOMOLOGY. 



BRITISH AND FOREIGN BEETLES. 



The term Beetle has frequently been used as the name 

 common to the species of the family Scarahadda, but it is 

 more commonly and properly used to designate those insects 

 which are covered by a strong horny substance, the abdominal 

 part of the body being protected by two sheaths under which 

 the wings are folded. Hence the term is synonymous with 

 Coleoptera. No form of animal life has attracted the attention 

 of naturalists more constantly, and proved more generally 

 instructive, than that of insects ; and " among these," says 

 Mr. Noel Humplireys, " the beetle tribe especially were 

 noticed by the ancients at a very early period, from two very 

 opposite points of view — superstition and philosophy. With 

 the sacerdotal naturalists of Egypt, who had carefully ob- 

 served the habits and transformations of the Beetle, that 

 insect became a symbol of the principle of metempsychosis, 

 and other theological dogmas ; while with the Greeks, in the 

 hands of Aristotle, it became an example of one of the acutest 

 methods of classification, founded on anatomical structure, 

 that science ever devised. Finding that the whole of the 

 beetle family were furnished with wings protected by a 

 sheath-like covering, he compounded of the word x^^^^^' ^ 

 scabbard or case, and nrepa, wings — a term which is still 

 generally applied by naturalists to the entomological order 

 comprisii]g the beetles. It is true that some of the insects 

 included by Aristotle in his great family of Coleoptera, have 

 been removed by modern science to other natural orders ; but 

 the great distinctive feature, as a class definition, and also the 

 very name by which the father of natural history distinguished 

 it, are both retained in the natural pliilosophy of modern 



