INSECT VARIETY. 49 



her snares. Less retiring-, but little less moody and fierce, 

 longicorn beetles, when enclosed tog-ether, amputate one 

 another's leg's and antennae with a treacherous snip of their 

 powerful and trenchant mandibles, as do several ot* the soft- 

 skinned beetles, or Malacoderma, who then eat the slain and 

 maimed in the fray. This circumstance does not escape the 

 quick-eyed Chinese, who, in their old-world love for excruciating 

 sj)ort, keep bottles for matching- beetle-fights, receptacles in 

 which our school-boys sometimes eng-age the steel-blue Telephori 

 that appear on hedgerow plants with the May blossoms. There 

 is a tale told of the late Mr. Frederick Smith, who, having 

 captured a number of examples of a rare Oil Beetle near Mar- 

 gate, as they were crawling near the nest of the bee on which 

 they were parasitic, put them into a box, thinking no harm of 

 them; but found that on the second day of their captivity, a 

 free fight had taken place among them, the result of which was 

 that some were killed and reduced to fragments, the greater 

 number of survivors had lost either legs or antennae, or both, 

 and out of two dozen beetles only four escaped without injury. 



Many pachydermous beetles with small jaws, and conse- 

 quently bad fighters in a state of nature, notwithstanding, evince 

 a coleopterous disposition to the combat. This is recorded of 

 the tree-boring Scolytus, and of certain snouted weevils (Lepto- 

 rhynehus), that appear in May and June in the Aru Islands. 

 Regarding these, Mr. Wallace tells us, " I once saw two males 

 fighting together ; each had a foreleg laid across the neck of the 

 other, and the rostrum bent quite in an attitude of defiance, 

 and looking most ridiculous. Another time, two were fighting 

 for a female, who stood by busy at her boring. They j^ushed 

 at each other with their rostra, and clawed and thumped 

 apparently in the greatest rage.''^ 



The Yellow Wasps, the symbol of war, do not seem mutually 

 pugnacious in the ratio of other Aculeata and ants, who fight, 

 combine in battle, or attack intruders on their communities. 

 The queens of the hive fight, and their sterile maidens destroy 

 the males in summer, those proverbially idle drones. Yellow 

 ants of the kinds termed Emmets, or Mymica, attack one another 

 when on the move (Plate I., Fig. 4, h) ; others combine in war, 

 as the common Wood Ant [Formica riifa), and the larger 



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