ORDER I. COLEOPTERA. 6? 



marked ; of a glorious green colour, shaded, or rather 

 illuminated with crimson and gold, and bearing cream- 

 coloured spots ; long wiry crimson legs with a metallic 

 lustre, and breast and belly clothed with burnished plate 

 armour of bluish green, crimson, and gold : this is the 

 Tiger-beetle. 



The ferocity of this beetle is perhaps as great as that 

 of any animal known. The female has often been seen 

 to deliberately dismember and eat her husband, though 

 it remains a puzzle to naturalists that the husband an 

 insect apparently equal to herself, or nearly so, in size 

 and power should submit to this. In captivity the 

 Cicindelse will (says Mr. Holmes, "Zoologist," 475) "fight 

 savagely, rearing up against one another like dogs. I 

 have known one decapitate his adversary by a single 

 stroke of his jaws." It is not, however, usual for beetles 

 to prey on their own species when alive and not in con- 

 finement, though this rule is not without exception. 

 The female may be known by two dusky spots near the 

 base of the elytra, and also by the difference of form in 

 the legs of the two sexes ; the tarsi being simple in the 

 female, while in the male the three basal joints are 

 slightly dilated and cushioned. 



There are only five British species of the Cicindela, 

 which may be recognised by a pointed claw or hook 

 terminating the maxillaa, and which is found in no other 

 British land beetle (see fig. 4, p. 30). The Cicindela 

 is essentially diurnal in its habits, running and flying 

 freely in the sunshine. 



Carabusviolaceus (PL I. fig. 2), another of the raven- 

 ous land beetles, is a large, elegantly formed beetle with a 

 beautiful violet lustre upon the thorax and the wing- 

 cases, which latter, like those of many of the family, are 



