ENTOMOLOGICAL CABINET. 



Aphides that it has slain and devoured. From the 

 head to the tail this pygmy destroyer of the helpless 

 is defended by a thick coat, or rather mountain, com- 

 posed of the skins, limbs and down of these creatures. 

 Reaumur, in order to ascertain how far this covering 

 was necessary, removed it, and put the animal into a 

 glass, at one time with a silk cocoon, and at another 

 with raspings of paper. In the first instance, in the 

 space of an hour, it had clothed itself with particles of 

 the silk : and in the second, being again laid bare, it 

 found the paper so convenient a material, that it 

 made of it a coat of unusual thickness." 



It may be curious to observe, that we have never 

 met with the eggs on an annual plant, but always 

 fixed to the leaves of shrubs, fruit or forest trees, and 

 the larvae are ever beaten from these, or seeking the 

 aphides on the trunks of trees, and from the colours 

 of their bodies being of a greenish-brown, are not 

 easily detected. The larvae, towards the end of May, 

 when the spring brood of the Aphides is nearly 

 over, prepare for the important change into the pupa 

 state ; and for this, the extremity of the body is fur- 

 nished with a small fleshy retractile cylinder, from 

 which proceeds the silken thread that forms the co- 

 coon enclosing the pupa. Reaumur says the pupa is 

 not so big as a small pea ; yet the body of the fly is 

 nearly half an inch long, and covers, when its wings 

 and antenna? are expanded, a surface of an inch 

 square. 



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