THE OLD WEEVILS 181 



to some extent ; and the miry winding-sheet received 

 the drowned Beetles as the disorder of the passage left 

 them. 



These strangers, come perhaps from afar, supply us 

 with precious information. They tell us that, whereas 

 the banks of the lake had the Mosquito as the chief 

 representative of the insect class, the woods had the 

 Weevil. 



Outside the snout-carrying family, the sheets of my 

 Apt rock show me hardly anything more, especially in 

 the order of the Coleoptera. Where are the other ter- 

 restrial groups, the Carabus, the Dung-beetle, the Capri- 

 corn, which the wash of the rains, indifferent as to its 

 harvests, would have brought to the lake even as it did 

 the Weevil ? There is not the least vestige of those 

 tribes, so prosperous to-day. 



Where are the Hydrophilus, the Gyrinus, the Dytiscus, 

 all inhabitants of the water ? These lacustrians had a 

 great chance of coming down to us mummified between 

 two sheets of marl. If there were any in those days, they 

 lived in the lake, whose muds would have preserved these 

 horn-clad insects even more perfectly than the little fishes 

 and especially than the Dipteron. Well, of those aquatic 

 Coleoptera there is no trace either. 



Where were they, where were those missing from the 

 geological reliquary ? Where were they of the thickets, 

 of the green-sward, of the worm-eaten trunks : Capricorns, 

 borers of wood ; Sacred Beetles, workers in dung ; Carabi, 

 disembowellers of game ? One and all were in the limbo 

 of the time to come. The present of that period did not 

 possess them : the future awaited them. The Weevil, 

 therefore, if I may credit the modest records which I 

 am free to consult, is the oldest of the Coleoptera. 



