Highland Insects. 



129 



wood of the pine, beneath, the bark, passing the winter in 

 nests formed of chewed fibre, and eventually turning into pupa 

 within a similar rampart. They seem to assume the perfect 

 condition late in the summer or beginning of autumn, hyber- 

 nating in their cell until the first hot days of the spring, when 

 they gnaw a way to outer light with their powerful mandibles 

 through the pine bark, which often looks as if it had served as 

 a target for pistol practice, owing to the number, size, and 

 neatly-cut edges of these escape holes. 



Although lignivorous by nature, the males of this curious 

 insect are excessively pugnacious ; two of them settling on a 

 tree-trunk being almost sure to fight, so that it becomes any- 



thing but easy to find specimens with their fragile appendages 

 quite perfect. It is a fine sight to the untravelled coleopterist 

 to see a male of this exotic- looking creature flying across a 

 glade of the forest, with his long antennee streaming behind 

 like the pennants of a ship. The inhabitants of the village are 

 quite familiar with the Astinomus, on account of its frequenting 

 the wood-huts, timber- cutting yards, and even the door-posts 

 of the shanties, usually settling and gravely walking about with 

 its horns extended laterally like an open pair of compasses, 

 from which habit, indeed, it derives its fanciful specific name 

 of " ^Edile/' as if a surveyor of buildings. 



vol. x. — NO. II. K 



