INSECT VARIETY. 129 



sometimes because they live darkling- and are repulsively blacky and 

 sometimes because they sparkle with the g-ayest greens and 

 violets of the sunlight, who, like raptorial aves and mammalia, 

 scour waste land, ascend the tree trunk, or lie lurking- beneath 

 damp stones for unwary and weaker insects or chance refuse 

 that may fall to their lot. Of these a few sj)ecies are ascertained 

 to stridulate, when seized or alarmed, by rubbing the abdomen 

 against the elytra; others, again, seem to make a sound by 

 rubbing the thighs against the borders of the elytra. The files, 

 or limae, are placed on the dorsal arc of the anal segment, or at 

 the inflexed lateral margins of the elytra. 



When primroses, anemones, and knots of violets carpet the 

 oak wood, and the fig-wort ranunculus glistens on damp 

 meadows, an elegant predaceous beetle may be started from 

 beneath decaying leaves. This intrusion it resents by a " low, 

 angry, hissing- sound, distinctly audible at some distance,^' 

 ascribed by the Rev. T. Marshall to the friction of the ventral 

 arcs of the abdomen in the grooves formed by the inflexed 

 margins of the elytra. The sound, indeed, may be imitated by 

 rubbing- the edge of a piece of stiff paper in the channel. Herr 

 Westring remarks, regarding the ridge (lima) which runs parallel 

 with the wing margin at the place a little distant from the tip 

 where it is inflexed, that it is very subtilely scabrous, and Mr. F. 

 Smith terms this coleopteron {Ci/chrus rostratits, L.), the most 

 accomplished English musician. 



Certain little metallic Ground Beetles are in the perfect state 

 when the white water ranunculus begins to fleck the village 

 pond with its stars, and pass the sunshine of the spring in 

 hunting its muddy margin for such game as its foetid banks 

 supply. These little Nimrods — recognised by the rows of 

 ocellated depressions on their brassy elytra — possess the power to 

 utter a faint musical note, first put on record by Herr Westring in 

 Sweden respecting a Blethisamultipunctata,iowo.di semi-torpid (?) 

 in October at the root of a spindle-tree. Their stridulation is 

 accomplished by rubbing the upper surface of the last or anal 

 segment of the abdomen on the under side of the elytra. The 

 musical limse are easily found with a magnifying glass (Plate III., 

 Fig. 4), and constitute two serrated and raised posteriorly 

 diverging ridges (/), one at either side of the anal segment, 

 J 



