The Glow- Worm and Other Beetles 



bit there, enough to tell me the nature of the 

 first layers which the grub adds to its natal 

 sheath. With the exception of the Taxicorn 

 Clythra, whose egg, with its suspension-stalk, 

 seems to denote rather special habits, I see 

 my several charges begin to prolong their 

 shell with a brown paste, similar in appear- 

 ance to that with whose manufacture and em- 

 ployment we are already familiar. 



Discouraged by a food which does not suit 

 them and perhaps also tried by a season of 

 exceptional drouth, my young potters soon 

 relinquish their task; they die after adding a 

 shallow rim to their pots. 



Only the Long-legged Clythra thrives and 

 repays me amply for my troublesome nursing. 

 I provide it with chips of old bark taken from 

 the first tree to hand, the oak, the olive, the 

 fig-tree and many others. I soften them by 

 steeping them for a short time in water. 

 The cork-like crusts, however, are not what 

 my boarders eat. The actual food, the but- 

 ter on the bread, is on the surface. There is 

 a little here of all that the first beginnings of 

 vegetable life add to old tree-trunks, all that 

 breaks up decrepit age to turn it into perpe- 

 tual youth. 



There are tufts of moss, hardly a twelfth 

 of an inch in height, which were sleeping 

 474 



