LONDON INSECTS 99 



leave the quagmire of the Hemiptera and come to the 

 Orthoptera and Coleoptera Grasshoppers, etc., and 

 Beetles. 



One can, when one meets with it, recognise an insect 

 with thick sheaths (/coXeo?) as upper wings covering a 

 lighter transparent pair, and can understand that there 

 is a difference between those which have their under 

 wings crossed and those which fold them straight like 

 a fan straight wings, and is all the better prepared 

 to admit the necessity for separating the two orders, 

 when one is told that there are even more important 

 differences in their earlier stages, the true cross- winged 

 Beetles being, like Butterflies, subject, as a rule, to com- 

 plete the Orthoptera, only to partial metamorphosis. 



Unless they have all vanished in the last clearance 

 of trees, there are very good specimens to be seen 

 in Kensington Gardens of the curious symmetrical 

 workings of a small tree-destroying Beetle named, 

 from the mischief it can do, Scolytiis destructor. The 

 female forces herself under the rough outer bark of 

 elms and eats her way through the soft tissue between 

 it and the hard wood, dropping her eggs, at regular 

 intervals, to the right and left as she goes. 



Each grub as it is hatched begins working on its own 

 account, and guided by some unaccountable instinct, 

 or perhaps by the position in which the egg is laid, 

 drives a shaft of its own outwards from the centre 

 passage bored by the mother, in a line parallel to that 

 of the brother or sister next to it. The result is a 

 grooved pattern to be seen when, as is sure to follow, 



