BEAUTIFUL ANTENNA. 169 



patches seem to play among them as the light shifts, exactly as 

 we have all seen when walking in a diagonal direction to a row 

 of iron palings. The specific name mystacina is Greek, and 

 signifies " moustached " — the latter word, indeed, being only 

 a Gallicized form of the Greek, and from the French naturalized 

 in Eno-lish. 



Like the preceding insect, the Ehipidocera is slow and 

 sluggish in its movements, and neither on foot nor on the wing 

 does it move swiftly enough to make its capture difficult. It 

 never rises to any height in the air, but, like our own Soldiers 

 and Sailors, is found on the low plants at the edges of the 

 forests. It does not, however, feed upon the flowers, but prefers 

 the leaves and the young tender shoots. M. Lacordaire believes 

 that in its larval state it feeds upon decaying wood, as he once 

 saw a newly-disclosed specimen sitting in a burrow near the 

 entrance, as if about to emerge into the outer world. 



Some allied insects are gathered together under the generic 

 title of Callirhipis, i.e. " beautiful fan." The males of these 

 insects have only eleven joints in their antenna3, but each of 

 them is furnished with a veiy long, thread-like fiabellum, in one 

 species {Callirhipis Childreni of Brazil) almost three-quarters as 

 long as the entire body. Indeed, so long and so delicate are 

 they, that the observer naturally wonders how the insect can 

 keep them in order, a task which seems impossible without the 

 use of a comb. Another species {Callirhipis Dejeani) has the 

 fiabelloe of the antennae much flatter, and pressed closely 

 together, like the sticks of a lady's fan when closed. 



In all these insects the males are much more common than 

 the females, not so much on account of their greater number, 

 as by reason of their habits. The male flies abroad, and can 

 easily be seen, while in many of the species the female never 

 moves out of the burrow in which she passed through her trans- 

 formations, the male having to search for a mate under these 

 very adverse circumstances, and not even having the satisfac- 

 tion of seeing her when he has found her. 



o 



We now come to the family of the Clerida?, a group of insects 

 which is mostly brightly coloured and banded, and generally 

 has the body covered with hairs. In their larval state many of 



