ON THE STUDY OF ENTOMOLOGY. 653 
into glasses half filled with earth and covered with a tuft of grass, 
and in a piece of muslin; in a fortnight, he found some hundreds of 
eggs deposited, placing the glasses in a cellar they were hatched to¬ 
wards autumn, and the grubs increased remarkably in size. In the 
following May. they fed so voraciously, that they required a fresh 
turf every second day; hut this proving too scanty, he sowed in sev¬ 
eral garden pots, peas, lentils, and salad; and when the plants were 
up, he put a pair of grubs in each pot, and in this manner he fed 
them through the second and third years; during this period they 
cast their skins three or four times, going for this purpose deeper in 
the ground, where they may effect this change undisturbed, and they 
do the same in winter when they become torpid and do not eat. 
When the grub changes into a pupa the third autumn after it is 
hatched, it digs a similar burrow, about a yard deep, and when kept 
in a pot, and prevented from going deep enough, it shows great un¬ 
easiness, and often dies. The perfect beetle comes forth from the 
pupa in January or February, but does not acquire its hardness or 
colour for ten or twelve days, and seldom makes its appearance above 
ground before May, being the fourth year from the time of hatching, 
during all this time it feeds upon the roots of herbage, sometimes de¬ 
stroying whole acres of grass, it undermines the richest meadows, 
and so loosens the turf that it will roll up as if cut with the turfing 
spade. A poor farmer, near Norwich, suffered so much from their 
depredations some years ago, that the court of the city allowed him 
£25 out of pity for the great damage he had sustained, and the man 
and his servant declared that they gathered as many as eighty bushels 
of the insect. In the year 1783 many provinces of France were so 
ravaged by them, that a premium was offered by the government for 
the best method of destroying them. They do not confine them¬ 
selves to grass, but eat also the roots of corn, and it is to feast upon 
this grub chiefly that the rooks follow so attentively the plough. 
Both forest and fruit trees sometimes suffer materially from the rava¬ 
ges of the perfect beetles, in connection with the summer-chaffer or 
Fern web (Zantlieumia solstitialis,) and the braken clock, (Anomala 
Horticola) which unitedly devour the leaves of the sycamore, lime, 
beech, willow, elm, apple, See. See. and are sometimes so numerous as 
to strip whole trees entirely of their foliage. Mouffet relates that in 
1574, such a number of the common Chafer (M. vulgaris) fell into 
the river Severn as to stop the wheels of the water-mills. It is also 
recorded in the philosophical transactions that in the year 1688 thev 
filled the hedges and trees of part of the county of Galway in such 
immense numbers as to cling to each other like clusters of bees when 
