Report of the State Entomologist. 95 



Long Imprisonment of Beetles within Furniture. 



Mauj iustauces are recorded where different sj^ecies of longicorn 

 beetles have made their escape from furniture within the wood of 

 which they had lived as larva, after a period of years so greatly in excess 

 of what is known of the natural term of life in the larval and pupal 

 stages of the same insects, that the statements, if accej)ted, can only 

 be explained through the operation of the artificial conditions under 

 which they had been placed. It is not impossible, that in such 

 instances of unnaturally prolonged lives, there may have resulted a 

 lethargic condition in which respiration and accompanying pheno- 

 mena were almost or entirely suspended through the complete exclu- 

 sion of air (a hermetic sealing) by the rubbing, oiling, varnishing, or 

 other polishing which the furniture had undergone. 



As an example of such prolonged vitality, the following extract is 

 made from the Third Report on the Insects of New York, by Dr. 

 Fitch (3d-5th Reports, 1859, p. 8), compiled from a more extended 

 notice contained in the History of the County of Berkshire, published 

 at Pittsfield, 1829, p. 39: 



In 1786, a son of Gen. Israel Putnam, residing in Williamstown, 

 Mass., had a table made from one of his apple trees. Many years 

 afterwards the gnawing of an insect was heard in one of the leaves of 

 this table, which noise continued for a year or two, when a large, 

 long-horned beetle made its exit therefrom. Subsequently the same 

 noise was heard again, and another insect, and afterwards a third, all 

 of the same kind, issued from this table leaf — the first one coming 

 out twenty, and the last one twenty-eight, years after the tree was cut 

 down. 



From evidence obtained by Dr. Fitch, he believed that there could 

 be no doubt but that the insect was the longicorn beetle Ceraspho- 

 rus halteatus, figured on Plate 1, fig. 8, of the Report above cited — now 

 known as Ghion cinctus (Drury). 



In Silliman's Journal of Science and Arts, vol. x, 1826, p. 65, is a 

 short reference to a more detailed notice elsewhere, of an insect 

 believed by the writer to have been a species of Urocerus — a large 

 hymenopterous insect commonly known as a " horn-tail " — which 

 had escaped from a table made of an apple-tree, twenty-eight years 

 after the cutting of the tree. It would ap2:)ear as if the two accounts 

 might refer to the same occurrence. 



Silliman's Journal, vol. ix., p. 85, copies from Brewster's Edinburgh 

 Journal, No. 3, p. 85, a paper on the escape of an Ui'ocerus (different 

 from U. giga^) from a table made of deal and veneered with mahogany, 

 in England, but without giving the age of the table or other desirable 

 particulars. 



