320 THE CHURCH-YARD BEETLE. 



and laid his Lead upon the earth beside the bird, without 

 the smallest motion, for a full hour, as if to rest ; then again 

 crept under the earth. The next day, in the morning, the bird 

 was an inch and a half below the surface of the ground, and 

 the trench remaining open ; the corpse seemed as if laid out 

 upon a bier, surrounded by a rampart of mould. In the 

 evening it had sunk half an inch lower, and in another day 

 the work was completed, and the bird covered. Other dead 

 animals being added, the four beetles, in fifty days, interred no 

 less than twelve bodies in the narrow cemetery allotted for 

 their work. 1 



Of a sepulchral character in unison with the above, but of 

 associations much more gloomy as connected with ourselves, is 

 the beetle of the churchyard, 2 our proposed pattern for a vane 

 on the Exchange. 



This dark, ill-favoured, ill-scented, and, in the eye of super- 

 stition, ill-omened insect whose proper name (Blaps mor- 

 tisaga) savours of mortality as strongly as its common, though 

 not popular appellation is one of those creeping things from 

 which whenever, in its favourite haunt, it happens to cross 

 our path, we turn instinctively away, even as we are wont 

 with other, the like mementos, come they in what shape 

 they may. 



The sepulchral locality in which the Slaps mortisaga is 

 usually met with, may serve, of itself, to enable those unac- 

 quainted with insects to give a pretty shrewd guess as to its 

 character and occupation. It may also be distinguished as 

 one of the blackest of all black beetles, its funeral sable being 

 totally unrelieved by those tints of green, and blue, and violet, 

 or even brown, which, in most others of its tribe, serve to 

 enliven their prevailing sombre hue. In form, this haunter of 

 cemeteries is rather long and slender, both the body and the 

 wing-cases, by which it is quite covered, terminating in a 



1 M. Gleditsch, quoted by Kirby and Spence ; also in " Insect Architecture." 



2 Blaps Mortisaga. See Vignette. 



