Sir J. Lubbock on the Metamorphoses of Insects. 377 
formed legs. But though evidently adapted for an active life, the 
young larvee remain quiet among their empty egg-shells until the 
spring. Then the Anthophora comes to maturity, and as it passes 
out along the burrow the young larvee spring upon it. The male 
bees, however, leave their cells about a month before the females ; 
consequently the larva first finds itself on the male bee, from which, 
however, at the first opportunity it passes to the female. She, poor 
thing, unconscious of her misfortune, proceeds to excavate her burrow 
in the usual manner, constructs the usual cell, and fills it with honey. 
On the honey she lays her egg, but at this moment the larva of 
Sitaris springs on to the egg and floats on it, as ona raft. It then 
tears open the egg and devours it, thus at once destroying a rival, 
and making its first meal. As it has by this time been seven months 
without food, this its first food must be very welcome. But it is 
necessary on another account. The larva in its first form, though 
beautifully fitted for its mode of life, is quite unsuited to live on honey 
in a bees’ cell. Hence a change of formis necessary. The increase 
of size produced by devouring the egg enables the larva to change 
its skin, and it now emerges in a form very different indeed from the 
list. The eyes have disappeared; the legs and antenne are rudi- 
mentary. ‘The mouth is so placed that when the larva floats on the 
honey it is just below the surface, while the spiracles are arranged 
along the back so as to be just above it. Lastly, the belly is very 
protuberant, and thus prevents the larva from rolling, in which case 
the spiracles might be choked by the honey, and the insect suffucated. 
After living from thirty-five to forty days in this condition, during 
which it increases very considerably in size, the larva ceases to feed, 
and contracts into an ovoid body, resembling in many respects the 
so-called pupa of a fly. Withirthis, as in a case, it forms a new 
skin, and takes on a fourth form not very unlike the second. After 
four or five weeks it changes again into a chrysalis, from which finally 
the perfect beetle emerges. 
Here, then, we find, first, a remarkable change of form accompany- 
ing a change of habits, and, secondly, a case in which the life is di- 
vided into more than three well-marked stages. This phenomenon 
received from M. Fabre the name of hypermetamorphosis. For 
some time the cases of Sttaris and Meloe were looked on as excep- 
tional; but in 1862 the attention of the lecturer was called to the 
question by observing a somewhat similar case in Lonchoptera, a 
genus of small flies. Moreover he found that in many species be- 
longing to the Orthoptera and Hemiptera the stages were much less 
definite and more gradual than had hitherto been supposed. 
In illustration of this he described the transformations of Chloéon 
(Ephemeride), and showed that the perfect form was attained through 
more than twenty changes of skin, each attended by a slight 
change of form. In its preparatory stages this insect lives in the 
water, but in the last two it becomes aérial. Sir John Lubbock had 
been so fortunate as to see more than once the passage from the 
aquatie to the aérial condition: the larva floated helplessly on the 
surface of the water; suddenly the skin burst, the insect sprang out 
