166 



MODERN CLASSIFICATION OF INSECTS. 



Fig. 16. 



feeding upon the same substances. The body is long and narrow, 

 with the head and anterior segments broadest ; the thirteenth 

 segment is succeeded by a conical tube (being a fourteenth seg- 

 ment), which is employed as a seventh leg; from the superior 

 lateral angles of the thirteenth segment there also arise a pair of long 

 slender conical and articulated setas, having a few bristles scattered 

 along their surface, evidently representing the peculiar anal ap- 

 pendages of the imago. In some species (as in the perfect insects) 

 the head is narrowed behind into a distinct neck ; the head is furnished 

 on each side with several tubercular ocelli ; the jaws are very powerful 

 and forcipate, and the legs are moderately long. Gravenhorst, in the 

 Preface to his Coleoptera Microptera, has noticed the great difficulty 

 attendant upon the rearing of the larvae of these and similar insects, 

 and which he had failed in accomplishing; indeed, he had only noticed 

 a shigle larva, which he regards as that of Goerius olens. Gsedart has 

 given two very characteristic figures of a larva, and of Creophilus 

 maxillosus, which he describes as " prtecedentis vermis conjux;" 

 noticing, in his quaint style, the voracity of both. Swammerdam also 

 mentions the Staphylinus, which "seeming of a middle nature between 

 the beetle and Scolopendra, can very quickly kill earthworms with its 

 teeth, and afterwards suck them. I preserved five species of it, to- 

 gether with the worm and nymph, which exhibits the parts of the 

 future insect, but somewhat obscurely." There is also a memoir upon 

 the larva of Staphylinus by M. Brez in the Memoires de Lausanne, 

 vol. iii. p. 13. See also Frisch. vol. i. pt. 5. t. 25. Mr. Walford, in 

 the ninth volume of the LinncBan Transactions, published an account, 

 accompanied by an admirable figure, of a small larva which infests 

 wheat in its earliest stage of growth by eating into the young plant 

 about an inch below the surface and devouring the central part, thus 



