8 2 DARWINIANISM. 



Helena, La Plata, and Van Diemen's Land. If aborigines, 

 it is " a difficult point to ascertain on what food they 

 formerly subsisted " in St. Helena, where there had been 

 no quadrupeds till only very recently. And he had been 

 struck, it seems, with a similar difficulty in Van Diemen's 

 Land. In Europe these beetles are " confined in their 

 appetites," each of them keeping to its own quadruped 

 and repugning the rest. Must it be supposed that the 

 Van Diemen's Land beetles, losing the kangaroo, had 

 taken to the cow, although it " had been then introduced 

 only thirty -three years"? Mr. Darwin finds this 

 apparent change of habits " highly remarkable ; " and he 

 plainly thinks it a pity that there should be so few 

 insects of the sort, and that, consequently, such a quantity 

 of good food should be " lost " in La Plata, " where, from 

 the vast number of cattle and horses, the fine plains of turf 

 are richly manured." So " I imagined," says Mr. Darwin, 

 " I saw in this an instance where man had disturbed that 

 chain, by which so many animals are linked together." 

 The special stercovora of which he speaks are named 

 Aphodius, Orgetes, Phanseus, etc., and the note is con- 

 cluded by the acknowledgment, " I am indebted to the 

 Eev. F. W. Hope, who, I hope, will permit me to call him 

 my master in Entomology, for giving me the names of 

 the foregoing insects." 



It occurs to one here that it is remarkable how every- 

 thing seems to have remained unchanged with a mere 

 dung-beetle during all these twenty-two hundred years 

 that separate Aristotle from Darwin. The latter tells 

 here of a Phanseus that " buries the dung of the cattle in 

 large earthen balls beneath the ground;" and the former 

 speaks of a Cantharus that rolls up the dung in which it 

 buries itself during the winter. In both, doubtless, it is 

 the same insect that bears elsewhere, from the habit in 

 question, the name of Pilularius. 



