INSECT VARIETY. 67 



crickets, grasshoppers, beetles, and bees, or employ a palpus, 

 as the Phrygauidae, or the spine terminating the fore tibiae, as 

 some others. Most insects in cleaning the body, head, and 

 wings employ either the tibiae, or tarsi of their legs, which we 

 conclude must have a power of feeling the gathered dust and 

 defilement invisible to the immovable visual organs. 



This extreme sensitiveness of parts to touch has a yet 

 higher expression as a telegraphy or language between the 

 sexes. Insects with mandibles make known their presence to 

 the newly-emerged beauties by a rough bite at the head ; the 

 males of butterflies, bees, and Neuroptera caress fondly with 

 strokes of the antennae, and the predaceous meadow-flies of the 

 genus Emjyis toy together with the forelegs much as children 

 play at '"^Baker^s man,''^ each seeming to desire to have theirs 

 uppermost (Plate 1., Fig. 5). In certain insects that live gre- 

 gariously, as the social bees, ants, and beetles of the genus 

 Bembidinm, antennal touch takes its greatest expression as a 

 means of communication ; and here it is not alone an exponent 

 of sexual desire, but exj^resses recurrent emotions in the economy 

 of life, such as the presence of food and alarm on the disturbance 

 of a foraging file (Plate I., Fig. 4, a). Ants likewise throw 

 out their lines on the plan of scouts that advance, return, and 

 touch antennae, and then the stream moves onward in the track. 

 The scouting, however, as Sir John Lubbock has endeavoured 

 to establish, is carried on by antennal scent, and is furthered by 

 that singular property of surface conduction of odour kuown to 

 the lower creation, and doubtless due to the deposition of the 

 odorous dust by aerial currents. I well remember how a little 

 black bee, common on hawkweed heads on the Grisnez chalk- 

 cliff, on being brought into a room behaved in an ant-like fashion, 

 walking backwards and forwards to the freshly-gathered blossom, 

 touching as she Avent with her antennae, and now and anon 

 curling herself up as she would tuck in to sleep again in the 

 feathery down. Yet the fashion of a bee on the scent differs 

 from that of the ants in one respect — they work outwards in 

 concentric circles, and not on the linear system ; and of this the 

 late Mr. Frederick Smith brought forward two examples in the 

 Hunting Wasps. One was introduced to his notice by a gentle- 

 man at Barrackpore, who having taken a wounded Field-cricket 

 F 2 



