388 THE SCUTATA, 



of his net,, one or more specimens of a small, shining, 

 black, oval insect, prettily adorned with white patches 

 upon its upper surface. From the front of a small 

 flat head springs a four-jointed rostrum, which passes 

 down beneath the breast of the insect, and on each 

 side of the base of this, a moderately long antenna, 

 composed of five rather elongated joints, takes its rise. 

 The tibise are covered with short spines, and their 

 base is white, the remainder of the legs, including 

 the three-jointed tarsi, being black. On examining 

 the back of this pretty little insect, we soon find that 

 it belongs to the Heteropterous section of the Rhyn- 

 chota, for the basal portion of the anterior wings is 

 hard and horny, as far as the tip of a long triangular 

 scutellum, where it is separated by a slightly curved 

 line from a delicate brownish membrane which com- 

 pletes the hemelytron. This is the Sehirus bicolor, 

 one of the most generally distributed of the British 

 Bugs, which may very well serve us as a type of the 

 first tribe of these insects. The exserted antennae 

 are common to the whole section of the Geocores or 

 Land Bugs, and the four-jointed rostrum also occurs 

 in a great majority of these insects, but the tribe of 

 the SCUTATA or Shield Bugs, to which our little pied 

 unsavoury friend belongs, is distinguished from all 

 these by the large size of the scutellum, which always 

 reaches the base of the hemelytral membrane, and 

 sometimes even forms a complete shield covering the 

 whole, or nearly the whole of the wings. Besides 

 these characters, all the species of this group exhibit 

 a pair of ocelli on the crown of the head, and their 

 antennae spring from below the margin of the head; 

 in all the British species the latter organs are com- 

 posed of five joints. 



