VARIOUS INSECTS. 253 



over with a velvety coat, like the Mole-cricket ; an elegant 

 Phyttoptera, with bright, yellowish-green, semi-pellucid 

 wings, and the head and thorax covered with small, 

 raised pustules ; a golden-brown Acheta, a very pretty, 

 lively insect which takes prodigious leaps; a singular 

 Cyphocrania, with the back of the head produced into a 

 horn, and long reticulated, semi-opaque, brown wings ; 

 and a new species of Blepharis, an insect apparently 

 made up of so many withered leaves, which crawls very 

 slowly among the foliage of the low trees, and takes 

 short feeble flights like an Empusa. The chief use of 

 the Geotrupida, and other coprophagous Beetles, in tro- 

 pical countries, would seem to be not so much to remove 

 excrementitious matter from the surface of the earth, as 

 to spread it abroad for the purpose of manuring the soil. 

 This they effect by first collecting it in convenient round 

 balls, or masses, in which they deposit their eggs, and 

 then, rolling them along with their hind legs, they bury 

 them in different places in the ground. Such was the 

 useful occupation in which I found a species of Gymno- 

 pleurus engaged, under the shade of a grove of Casuarina 

 trees, where the ground was covered in many places 

 with large quantities of the dung of wild boars and of 

 deer, which dozens of these indefatigable black-coated 

 gentry were carefully spreading over the soil. 



From the chrysalis of the only species of the Sphynx 

 Moth I had observed in Borneo, and treasured by me 

 with great care, emerged, after the lapse of a considerable 

 time, two individuals of that odd-shaped, cosmopolite, 

 hymenopterous insect, the Evania appcndigaster \ The 

 coprophagous Beetles, and the scavenger Stapliylinidce, 



