86 ON THE GLOW-WORM AND ITS LARVA. 
I opened them out I found as I expected, several had died, but 
I still had plenty left to give away, and these were soon distri- 
buted. 
T had never doubted for a moment, but that all I had collected 
were perfect females, for I confess I was quite ignorant of the 
larva being luminous, until a few evenings ago, when one of my 
friends, to whom I had given a specimen or two, brought me, to 
my surprise, a skin, which one of these insects had cast. And he 
observed that this individual specimen had not been for several 
evenings shining so brilliantly as usual, and on trying to discover 
the reason, he found the insect in the act of changing its coat. 
The only conclusion that I could arrive at was, that the insect 
in question was in the larva state, and I therefore examined two 
or three that I had left, and discovered at once that they were 
alllarve. The only difference to the ordinary observer between 
the larva and perfect female being, that the former has a dis- 
tinct white spot on the outer edge of each segment of the abdo- 
men, while the latter is of a uniform dull brown colour, and 
spotless. I then referred to the various books I had at hand, to 
satisfy myself on the fact of the larva bemg luminous. Kirby 
and Spence, in their chapter on luminous insects say, “If you 
take one of these Glow-worms home with you for examination, 
you will find that in shape it somewhat resembles a caterpillar, 
only that it is much more depressed: and you will observe 
that the light proceeds from a pale coloured patch that termi- 
nates the under side of the abdomen. It is not, however, the 
larva of an insect, but the perfect female of a winged beetle,” 
&ec., &c.; but a few pages on, these authors state that De Geer 
discovered the larva to be luminous. Westwood, in his ‘“* Modern 
classification of insects,” after describing the female lampyris, says 
the larve, pups, and eggs are luminous, but enters into no 
details respecting them. Kiesenwetter, in his Coleoptera of 
Germany, also mentions the luminosity of the larva, but refers 
the reader to Ellis and Newport’s paper ‘On the Natural 
History of the Glow Worm,” in the first volume of the proceedings 
of the Linnean Society. In this paper Mr. Newport who has 
paid a great deal ofattention to the breeding of this insect, says, that 
