COLEOPTERA. 45 1 



we will give a few statistics: — In 1574, these insects were so 

 abundant in England that they stopped many mills on the Severn. 

 In 1688, in the county of Galway, in Ireland, they formed such a 

 black cloud that the sky was darkened for the distance of a league, 

 and the country people had great difficulty in making their hay in 

 the places where they alighted. They destroyed the whole of the 

 vegetation in such a way that the landscape assumed the desolate 

 appearance of winter. Their voracious jaws made a noise which 

 may be compared to that produced by the sawing of a large piece of 

 wood, and in the evening the buzzing of their wings resembled the 

 distant rolling of drums. The unfortunate Irish were reduced to the 

 necessity of cooking their invaders, and, for the want of any other 

 food, of eating them. In 1804, immense swarms of cockchafers, 

 precipitated by a violent wind into the Lake of Zurich, formed on 

 the shore ^a thick bank of bodies heaped up one on the other, the 

 putrid exhalations from which poisoned the atmosphere. On May 18, 

 1832, at nine o'clock in the evening, a legion of cockchafers 

 assailed a diligence on the road from Gournay to Gisors, just as it 

 was leaving the village of Talmontiers ; the horses, blinded and 

 terrified, refused to advance, and the driver had to return as far as 

 the village, to wait till this strange storm was over (Plate XL). 

 M. Mulsant, in his " Monographic des l>amellicornes de la France," 

 relates that in May, 1841, clouds of cockchafers traversed the Saone, 

 from the south-east in the direction of the north-west, and settled in 

 the vineyards of the Maconnais. The streets of the town of Macon 

 were so full of them that they were shovelled up with spades. At 

 certain hours, one could not pass over the bridge without whirling 

 a stick rapidly round and round, to protect oneself against their 

 touch. 



The coupling takes place towards the end of May, after which 

 the males die ; the females only surviving them for the time 

 necessary to ensure the propagation of the species. The number of 

 eggs which a female lays is from twenty to thirty. With her front leg 

 she hollows out a hole in the ground from two to four inches in 

 depth, and deposits her eggs, of a yellowish white and of the size of 

 hemp-seed, therein. Her instinct leads her to choose soft, light, and 

 well-manured soils, which are, at the same time, the best ventilated 

 and the most fertile. We may conclude from this that cultivation 

 and labour have made the cockchafer more common than it was 

 formerly. It is the child of civilisation, the parasite of agriculture. 

 In from four to six weeks after being laid, the little larvae are hatched 

 (Fig, 433), and immediately attack the roots of vegetables. They 



