138 THE CAUSES WHICH PROPAGATE 



near Turin, where Stag Beetles were collected sucking, and 

 some Longicorns were licking sap, in company with butterflies 

 and insects of other orders, a stridulating male o£ the Skip 

 Jacks ov Elaterida. This individual {Lacon murimis, L.), while 

 I had it in captivity, would on seizure invariably lift its head, 

 like others of this group, when preparing for a spring ; but, 

 instead of immediately afterwards depressing it to insert the 

 elastic pro-sternal spine in the meso-sternal groove, it first 

 nodded the head and thorax thrice with a movement and noise 

 resembling that of a Longicom — "Whee ! whee ! whee V — a sound, 

 I conceive, which originated in the rounded superior surfaces of 

 the twin claws that constitute the spine-point, which are faintly 

 striate, vibrating over the entrance of the meso-sternal groove. 



The music of the Death-watch Beetles, by association with 

 the latter days of a British sovereign, has attained familiarity 

 ^vith those even not professedly scientific. It was, we think, 

 one of those bright melancholy days, towards the latter part of 

 February, when the almond is already hoar with blossom, and 

 minute beetles float moat-like in the sunbeam, that King 

 William III. mounted Sir John Fen wick's sorrel pony, and rode into 

 the Home Park to see an excavation for a new canal, which was 

 to run in another longitudinal stripe, by the side of the existing 

 one, when just as he came to the head of the two canals opposite 

 the Ranger's Park pales, the sorrel pony trod on a molehill — 

 thrown up by one of those purblind creatures enjoying the 

 reviving tepid warmth — stumbled, and threw the monarch, 

 fracturing his collar-bone, an injury which subsequently caused 

 his death. The news of this sudden termination to the career 

 of the warrior king seems not to have broken altogether un- 

 looked for on his subjects ; for we must regard it as ominous 

 that the early volumes of the "Philosophical Transactions''' usher- 

 ing in the accession of Queen Anne are occupied with long 

 disquisitions on the doings of the Death-watches by the savants 

 of the day, Allen, Derham, and Stackhouse. These are de- 

 scribed as little beetles that ticked like a watch, and answered 

 one another from parts of the old wooden rooms, or in rotten 

 posts, each giving seven or eight cries, and then pausing for 

 the reply of its comrade, which is described as much smaller. 



The way in which the noise was produced, all agree, was 



