"f/"/J/<eti*.J LAMELLICORN1A. 41 



; generally taken on the wing; very rare; CUarlton (Lady Maryon Wilson, 

 one specimen taken in or about the year 1793*); Daren th Wood (Bye) ; Croydou 

 (Mason) ; Hollington and < iiu-stlinp, near Hastings (Butler, <to.) ; Stephens records it 

 from Hertford, Darenth Wood, Birch Wood, Dartford, Dorking, Coombe Wood, 

 Wisbeach, Bristol, Norfolk, and Suffolk. Mr. Mason's specimen is one of the inoat 

 recent instances of its capture in Britain : seeing a beetle flying past, he knocked it 

 down with his stick to see what it was, and found it to be this very rare species. 



GEOTRUPES Latreille. 



This genus contains upwards of a hundred species, which are chiefly 

 found in temperate climates ; the majority occur in Europe, Northern 

 and Central Asia, and North America, and very few appear to be inha- 

 bitants of tropical countries ; forty-five species are found in Europe, of 

 which seven occur in Britain ; they are large dark oval and convex 

 insects, and may be known by the short thick lamellate club of 

 antennae, the obtusely rounded posterior angles of thorax, and the 

 coriaceous lobes of the maxillae. G. stercorarius, L., is one of the beetles 

 that is most familiar to the ordinary observer of nature ; it is the 

 "shard-borne " beetle of Shakespeare, and goes by the popular names of 

 " Dor Beetle," " Dumble-dor," or " Clock," and in some districts, as Mr. 

 Rye observes, it is vulgarly called the " Lousy Watchman," from the 

 fact that it is perpetually infested with a brown Acarus, a species of 

 Gamusus ; it flies with a heavy flight on still warm evenings in summer 

 and autumn with a loud humming noise, and occasionally blunders into 

 people's faces, in which case it inflicts rather a sharp blow ; the species 

 of Geotrupes live, as a rule, in dung, but are also found in decaying 

 fungi, and sometimes at exuding sap; they have the power of making a 

 sharp squeaking noise by rubbing the back of the hind femora against 

 the abdomen. 



The larva of G. stercorarius has the greater part of the abdominal segments of 

 a slate colour or bluish-grey tint ; the head and thorax ure brownish, and part of 

 the first abdominal segment is dirty-white ; the female beetle digs a burrow about 

 a foot or a foot and a half deep in the earth below a patch of dung, of which 

 she carries down portions, and in them deposits an egg, from which in about eight 

 days the larva hatches, and proceeds to feed on the food thus prepared for ir ; 

 when this is consumed it is ready to assume the pupal state, and after a short time 

 emerges as a perfect beetle ; the larva* of the Geotrupina, like those of the Coprina 

 and Aphodiina, have the segments divided into transverse folds, but differ from tl.i-r 

 two tribes in the fact that the mandibles are furnished with several teeth, instead 

 of being simply bidentate or tridentate. 



I. Thorax of male with three horns in front G. TvPHOtPS, L. 



II. Thorax of male without horns. 



* This specimen is in Dr. Power's collection : Lady Maryon Wilson was one of our 

 earliest working Coleopterists, and used to take many good species at the end of the 

 last century, such as Lvditts femtgineus, Crioceris merdigera, Sec. ; of the latter 

 species I have two or three specimens taken by her in my collection. 



