120 



THE CHURCHYARD BEETLE. 



it to a greater depth. At length, wearied apparently with this 

 incessant labour, he came forth and laid his head upon the 

 earth beside the bird, without the smallest motion, for a full 

 hour, as if to rest ; then again crept under the earth. The 

 next day, in the morning, the bird was an inch and a half be- 

 low the surface of the ground, and the trench remaining open ; 

 the corpse seemed as if laid out upon a bier, surrounded by a 

 rampart of mould. In the evening it had sunk half an inch 

 lower, and in another day the work was completed, and the 

 bird covered. Other dead animals being added, the four 

 beetles, in fifty days, interred no less than twelve bodies in 

 the narrow cemetery allotted for their work.* 



Of a sepulchral character in unison with the above, but of 

 associations much more gloomy as connected with ourselves, 

 is the beetle of the churchyard,! our proposed pattern for a 

 vane on the Exchange. 



This dark, ill-favoured, ill-scented, and, in the eye of super- 

 stition, ill-omened insect whose proper name (Blaps mortisiga) 

 savours of mortality as strongly as its common, though not 

 popular appellation is one of those creeping things from 

 which whenever, in its favourite haunt, it happens to cross 

 our path, we turn instinctively away, even as we are wont with 

 other, the like mementos, come they in what shape they may. 



"To smell to a turf of fresh earth," says an old writer, "is 



* M. Gleditsch, quoted by Kirby and Spence ; also iu ' Insect Architecture.' 

 t Blaps mortisaga. See Vignette. 



