WOOD-RORING BEETLES 17 



furnished by the threadbare fabric of an old coat, the 

 vegetable and the animal diet seeming equally suited to 

 its taste, though it was at one time considered to be so 

 largely an animal feeder as to have been called by De 

 Geer vrillette carnassiere, "the carnivorous borer." 



Those who keep collections of foreign insects may 

 sometimes have the privilege (?) of breeding (uninten- 

 tionally) exotic species of Ptinus. Dried insects, when 

 arriving from abroad, sometimes contain in their car- 

 cases living larvae of Ptinidve, which fare sumptuously, 

 though silently and unobserved, upon the " dried meat " 

 by which they are surrounded a veritable "life in 

 death." I remember on one occasion looking at a store 

 box of exotic insects that had not been opened for some 

 time, and being astonished at finding a colony of some 

 dozen or so of a beautiful bright red Ptinus, prettily 

 ornamented with snow-white spots, gaily disporting 

 themselves amongst my stores, quite regardless of such 

 insecticides as were present. I succeeded in tracing 

 them to the huge carcase of a gigantic beetle that I had 

 unfortunately introduced into the society without pre- 

 viously submitting to quarantine, and in whose interior 

 the larvae had evidently been holding carnival at the 

 time of his introduction. 



The Ptini turned out to be a Polynesian species, which 

 had thus completed their life cycle many thousands of 

 miles from their birthplace. On their exclusion from 

 their coleopterous host, they seemed to have decided on 

 a change of diet, and so had calmly attacked the cork 

 lining of the box, neatly excavating in it a series of 

 hollows, to the extreme detriment of its appearance, at 

 least from my point of view. 



A most extraordinary trio of beetles now calls for 

 notice. They are closely allied to the genus Ptinus, 



B 



to 



