698 
ANNUAL REPORT OF NEW-YORK 
PINE. TRUNK. 
but most of them excavating their burrows in its outer layers 
immediately beneath the bark, girdling the tree more or less by 
their operations. Of the habits of the several American species 
which we know are bred in the pine from uniformly finding the 
beetles upon this tree, our knowledge is at present very limited. 
Hence we can give the reader but little information respecting 
them, except as they appear in their perfect state. The larvae, 
however, all bear a close resemblance to each other, and are so 
very different from the larvae of all other insects, that they can 
be recognized at a glance. They are destitute of feet, and their 
shape has been compared by different writers to that of a tad¬ 
pole, a battledoor, a pestle with its head flattened, a flattened 
matrass bottle, that is a round-bellied bottle with a long slender 
neck; and these comparisons will give the reader a sufficiently 
exact idea of their appearance, to enable him to distinguish a 
larva of this kind whenever it occurs to his notice. And on a 
particular inspection it will be seen that its anterior end is very 
broad, round, and strongly flattened, as though it had been 
pressed and distorted by some casuality, the upper and under 
surface of this flattened portion being covered with a harder 
callous-like plate which is differently sculptured in different 
species, and is marked on the upper side with two straight 
impressed lines, approaching each other anteriorly like an 
inverted letter Y, and on the under side similarly marked, or with 
only a single impressed line along the middle. This dilated 
portion forms the first segment of the thorax, and has the head 
sunk into its anterior end, with its black sharp-pointed mandi¬ 
bles or jaws projecting in front, like the blades of nippers. 
Sometimes, as in the Thick-legged Buprestjs, figured in my First 
Report, page 27 (Transactions, vol. xiv., p. 731,) an impressed 
line, resembling a suture, crosses the fore part of this dilated 
segment, seemingly dividing it and forming a short segment 
between it and the head. Two short segments succeed to this 
dilated one, the suture between which is sometimes so slight 
that t hey appear like one segment only. These short segments 
are followed by longer, narrower ones, ten in number, of nearly 
equal size, add only about half as broad as the anterior portion, 
to which they appear to form a cylindrical or slightly tapering 
tail-like appendage, the terminal segment being narrower than 
