THE STUDY OF ENTOMOLOGY. 
603 
p. 46, that lie once observed a pair of those useful insects, the N. 
Sepultor, in Copenhagen Fields, flying at the height of about twenty 
feet from the ground, when they suddenly descended, and crept 
under the body of a dead frog hid amongst the grass, although this 
was so dried up with the extreme heat of the weather, (1825) that 
little or no smell could he perceived, when' standing close to the 
place ; it was in the forenoon when the sun was bright and powerful, 
a time when scents are much less diffusible than in the cool of a 
dewy evening. M. Gleditsch also gives in the Acts of the Berlin 
Society, for 1752, some very interesting accounts of the labours of 
the N. Vespillo: “ He had often remarked that dead moles when 
laid upon the ground, especially if upon loose earth, were almost 
sure to disappear in the course of two or three days, often of twelve 
hours. To ascertain the cause, he placed a mole upon one of the 
beds in his garden; it had vanished by the third morning, and on 
digging where it had been laid, he found it buried to the depth of 
three inches, and under it four beetles, which seemed to have been 
the agents of this singular inhumation. Not perceiving any thing 
in the mole he buried it again; and on examining it at the end of 
six days, he found it swarming with maggots, apparently the issue 
of the beetles, which M. Gleditsch now naturally concluded had 
buried the carcass for the food of the future young. To determine 
these points more clearly, he put four of these insects into a glass 
vessel half filled with earth and properly secured, and upon the 
surface of the earth two frogs; in less than twelve hours, one of the 
frogs was interred by two of these beetles; the other two ran about 
the whole of the day, as if measuring the dimensions of the remain¬ 
ing corpse, which on the third day was also found buried;” this was 
accompanied with many other interesting experiments of a similar 
character. Mr. Rennie also tells us, that "In the summer of 1826, 
he found on Putney Heath, in Surrey, four of these beetles hard at 
work in burying a dead crow precisely in the manner described by 
M. Gleditsch.” And Messrs. Kirby and Spence in their Introduction 
to Entomology, p. 515, notice a very curious fact of these insects. 
“ A friend of M. Gleditsch being desirous of drying a dead toad, 
fixed it to the top of a piece of wood, which he stuck in the ground, 
but a short time afterwards he found that a body of these indefatig¬ 
able little sextons, had circumvented him, in spite of his precaution; 
not being able to reach the toad, they had undermined the stick 
until it fell, and then buried both the stick and the toad. 
Rusticus. 
(To be continued .) 
