360 Mr. H. W.<Bates on the 
Calleidé are all diurnal insects, and are seen actively coursing up 
and down the stems and the foliage of shrubs and trees in the 
day-time, whilst the Agr@ are scarcely ever thus seen, being 
found (with only one exception known to me). concealed in curled- 
up leaves, and motionless in the day-time. The Calletde are 
found in the tropical and subtropical zones over the whole earth, 
but the 4gre@ are peculiar to tropical America, and they increase 
in number of species in approaching the line of the Equator. 
They are the most purely arboreal in their habits of life of all the 
related genera, it might be said even of all the Geodephaga; their 
broad tarsi with brushy-palms and divergent pectinated claws 
adapting them for clinging to stems and foliage as beautifully as 
the similar structures in Chrysomelideous insects do in the case 
of those purely phytophagous tribes. The 4gre prey doubtlessly 
on the small larvee and soft-bodied insects which abound in the 
masses of adherent and interwoven or folded leaves of the trees 
on which they are found ; but being seen almost always motion- 
Jess by day, and therefore probably nocturnal feeders, I never had 
the opportunity of observing them in the act of feeding. 
There is very little else to be recorded of the habits of these 
elegant and most interesting insects. I have noticed, however, 
that they possess the crepitating power, which exists in so many 
other genera of the Section and reaches its acme in Brachi- 
nus and Pheropsophus. It is however very feeble, the explosion 
being not audible and perceptible only when the insects are held 
by the fingers near the posterior part of their bodies, when a slight 
explosion is felt, producing a sensation of warmth in the fingers, 
followed by a temporary stain diffused by the acid over the hinder 
part of the elytra. 
Although it has always been a favourite group with collectors, 
the 4gre have been, until recently, great rarities in European 
cabinets; Count Dejean, up to the year 1837 (the date of his 
last Catalogue), possessed only 13 species. ‘The German collec- 
tions, however, were much richer, chiefly owing to the assiduity 
with which several German collectors, who were encouraged to 
travel in Brazil on the marriage of the Emperor of that country 
with an Austrian Archduchess in 1817, searched for the rarer 
species of various groups of insects. One of these was Sieber, 
valet to Count Hoffmannsegg, whose master sent him to Para to 
collect, where in a short time he gathered some of the choicest 
species. Klug, in consequence, was able in 1824 to describe and 
enumerate 20 species, most of which were represented in the 
Berlin Museum; and in 1834 (in his Jahrbiicher) he increased 
