852 
[Assemhly 
mit. And when the beetle hatches from its pupa, it tears away 
the tine powder above it, as it crawls forward, which powder thus 
falls down upon the cushion of woody fibers, where we meet with 
it in the evacuated cells—and breaking through the- bark, it 
emerges from the tree. 
What is here described seems to be the common habit of most 
kinds of our timber borers. They complete their burrow by- 
gnawing a passage out to the bark, and then retire backwards a 
short distance and stuff'this upper extremity of the burrow with 
their castings, that birds, especially the woodpecker,, may not be 
able to detect, by its hollowness, the hole w'hich they have here 
formed under the bark. But this artifice is not always successful. 
Mr. P. Reid informs me that he once observed in the trunk of a 
sapling, a funnel shaped opening which had been dug by a wood¬ 
pecker, some two inches in depth, at the bottom of which, iucat-ed 
in the wood, was the shell-like relics of a pupa wdiich the bird 
had devoured, and below was the track by which the worm had 
come upwards in the wood to this point. At first he was exces¬ 
sively puzzled to account for this phenomenon—by what instinct 
or other faculty it was possible for a bird to discover a worm 
which was buried twrn inches deep in the wood, so as to be able 
to bore directly inw'ards to the exact point where it was lying 
until it occurred to him that the worm had itself made an open¬ 
ing outw'ards to the bark, by which to effect its escape aftei its 
changes were completed, and had then retreated-backwards into 
the wood again; and the woodpecker by tapping upon the bark 
had ascertained ^hat there was a cavity beneath, and immediately 
thereupon opened and enlarged this cavity sufficiently to enable 
him to reach the insect. What curious habits, what astonishing 
instances of foresight and intelligence do we daily meet with iu 
studying the works of nature, all concurring to show that these 
myriads of creatures, each furnished with its peculiar organs, and 
endow-ed with such marvellous faculties and instincts, could have 
been formed no otherwise than by a Creator who is infinite iuhis 
attributes. 
