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MEANS OF DEFENCE OF INSECTS. 



them from it. Thus, one of our scarcest British weevils 

 (Cleonus nebulosus), by its gray colour, spotted with black, 

 so closely imitates the soil, consisting of white sand mixed 

 with black earth, on which I have always found it, that its 

 chance of escape, even though it be hunted for by the lyncean 

 eye of an entomologist, is not small. Another insect of the 

 same tribe ( Thylacites scabriculus), of which I have observed 

 several species of ground-beetles (Harpalus, &c.) make great 

 havoc, abounds in pits of a loamy soil of the same colour pre- 

 cisely with itself ; a circumstance that doubtless occasions 

 many to escape from their pitiless foes. Several other weevils, 

 for instance Chlorima nivea and cretacea, resemble chalk, and 

 perhaps inhabit a chalky or white soil. But the most sur- 

 prising instance of this adaptation of the colour of an insect 

 to that of the soil where it resides, is found in some of the 

 Mantis tribe separated by M. Lefebvre under the generic 

 name of Eremiaphila, of which he has given so interesting an 

 account. These insects (which he met with in the nymph state 

 only, in the very midst of the African desert, leading to the 

 Oasis of Bahryah, about four days' journey from the Nile, 

 where he could not discover the slightest trace of any other 

 insect or substance on which it could by possibility feed, but 

 apparently passing a life of absolute solitude in the midst of 

 these burning sands,) had the most perfect identity of colour 

 with that of the soil on which it was found, being brown 

 where the soil was brown, and at not above a hundred paces 

 distant of a silvery white, when found amongst the white 

 particles of broken shells or calcareous rocks of a similar 

 dazzling colour. That it was the same species which ex- 

 hibited this change of colour, M. Lefebvre did not doubt, nor 

 that the object was its protection from its enemies, which it 

 was so well calculated to effect that he could scarcely detect 

 it by the closest inspection ; but he confesses himself unable 

 to explain whether the different-coloured Eremiaphilce were 

 confined to the soils of the same tints respectively, or, as in 

 the case of the birds and quadrupeds which become white in 

 winter in the Polar regions, they have the faculty of changing 

 their colour as they change their abode. 1 



1 Ann. Soc. Ent. de France, iv. 455. 



