ON A DRAGON KLY. 123 



ON A DRAGON FLY. 



By Silvands Wilkins. 



lifdil hefinc till' Sor'tPtii, Xnreiiiher 22, 1881 . 



In April last I bad the pleasure to win your kind attention to a 

 short jiaper on Fixh liearbifi, written in plain purpose to show that 

 some practical work can be done with little or no cruelty or waste 

 of life if your tools are of the rij^bt sort. 



I mentioned at the readin.t,' that I had been led to do this to refute 

 a Statement I had seen " that there was nothing to interest the 

 naturalist in the Midlands, and that it was a district to be shunned." 

 The Stickleback, I hope, furnished to my companions a fair instance 

 of fish life-history, in, it would be thought, the least likely of regions. 



I venture to fill up the allotted twenty minutes and space of five 

 or six pages this time on Insect Life, limiting it, as before, to what 

 anyone with patience may see or do, and as I am mildly indignant at 

 the above aspersion against the Black Country as a libel, it suggests 

 itself to me to choose the Libellulina for our notice, because it so 

 happens that this is quite as good a spot for watching the habits of 

 the Dragon-fly as it was for the fish, and perhaps that insect, having 

 all the parts in perfection that constitute a type insect, offers, take it 

 for all in all, from the egg to the imago, as quaint a series of pictures 

 as can be found in any one creature (excepting man, of course). 



Space will limit me to mode of capture and life-habit mostly, and a 

 full description of the mask apparatus, with its double joints and 

 hinges, seems better suited to a mechanical magazine than one on 

 natural history ; but of its form and anatomy an excellent and full 

 account can be found in Kirby and Speuce's or Westwood's Entomology. 



The larvae can be caught by sweeping against and through the 

 vegetation round the sides of pools with a strong net, or they may 

 be found in hollow pieces of old wood, into which they will crawl and 

 hide if placed in the shallows near the side ; another good plan is 

 to shovel up smartly some of the surface soil at the base of the 

 rushes, etc., and throw it on the sloping bank, then with a fine rose- 

 nozzle of a watering pot, wash out the mud steadily so that it drains 

 back, when the chances are you will see one of the larvse. 



This strange being seems as ill-born as Caliban, and is the veriest 

 dragon from the beginning, for it would appear that it is the nature of 

 the embryo — of this alone of all embryos— to have the trick of always 

 taking an obverse position in the egg. 



The respiration might not incorrectly, I think, be called a 

 perspiration only, and contains the principle of a patent to beat the 

 screw propeller, if one only knew how to apply it, and one is set 

 guessing if it is the inversion in the egg which has turned about the 

 action of the breathing so curiously. I hope this order of being is not 

 fated to be evil for ever because it had not the benefit of proper 

 inspiration at first. 



