HABITATIONS OF INSECTS. 453 



carefully extricated from its covering, you will find to 

 be the little miner of the tortuous galleries which you 

 are admiring. Some of these minute larvae, to which 

 the parenchyma of a leaf is a vast country, requiring se- 

 veral weeks to be traversed by the slow process of mining 

 which they adopt that of eating the excavated materials 

 as they proceed are transformed into beetles (Clonus 

 Thapsi, &c.) ; others into flies ; and a still greater num- 

 ber into very minute moths, as Gracillaria ? Wilkella, 

 ClerJcella, &c. Many of these last are little miracles of 

 nature, which has lavished on them the most splendid tints 

 tastefully combined with gold, silver and pearl : so that, 

 were they but formed upon a larger scale, they would 

 far eclipse all other animals in richness of decoration. 



Another tribe of larvae, not very numerous, content 

 themselves for their habitations with simple holes, into 

 which they retire occasionally. Many of these are merely 

 cylindrical burrows in the ground, as those formed by 

 the larvae of field-crickets, Cicindelae and Ephemerae. 

 But the larvae of the very remarkable lepidopterous ge- 

 nus (Nycterobius of Mr. MacLeay) before alluded to a , 

 excavate for themselves dwellings of a more artificial 

 construction ; forming cylindrical holes in the trees of 

 New Holland, particularly the different species of Bank- 

 sia, to which they are very destructive, and defending 

 the entrance against the attacks of the Mantes and other 

 carnivorous insects by a sort of trap-door composed of 

 silk interwoven with leaves and pieces of excrement, se- 

 curely fastened at the upper end, but left loose at the 

 lower for the free passage of the occupant. This abode 

 they regularly quit at sun-set, for the purpose of laying 



a P. 307, 392. 



