WHERE INSECTS LIVE. 
55 
would be many such, not hibernating, but pupating or feeding or in the 
egg stage. The fauna of these few inches would be of great interest, 
and we venture to assert that, in India at least, much light would be 
thrown on many insects’ life-histories were it better known. Coming 
to the actual surface a large fauna would reward us where any fallen 
leaves and the like offered shelter and food ; we have referred often to 
this fauna, a very extensive medley of black and dark brown insects, 
such as Earwigs, Cockchafers, Embiids, Carabids, Staphylinids, Clavi- 
cornia of many families, Tenebrionid and other beetles, as well as the 
Cydnine division of the Pentatomidse, the Lygseidse, the Keduviids and 
the Capsids ; besides these there are the abundant larva) of beetles, of 
Diptera. a few of Lepidoptera, probably outnumbering all the remain¬ 
der and teeming in favourite places. A square foot of good soil covered 
in leaf mould offers a great variety anywhere, and it is only on very dry 
or hard soil that one can anywhere find a square foot unoccupied and 
usually no square inch. This little part of our zone is one centre, the 
home of the light-shunning surface fauna which works at night and which 
makes up so large and so unknown a portion of the fauna. It may be 
noted that this part of our fauna is probably far less important in sub¬ 
tropical India than it is in tropical India, the surface fauna in the former 
being comparatively small. Above that we are on surer ground and the 
variety is not so confusing ; for each part of our plants will have their 
own fauna ; the stems contain borers, the Buprestids, Cerambycids, 
Pyralids, Cossids and the like; the bark shelters multitudes if it is 
at all loose or decomposing and here again is a centre of activity, 
nor rivalling our chief centre but very important and crowded; 
even the outside of our stems and trunks has cocoons and such like, as 
well as a whole fauna of its own in the case of a large tree round which 
debris collects. No one has ever described the fauna of the heap of de¬ 
caying leaves, bark, etc., found round the base of the trunk of a large 
pipal, for instance, which is the home of numberless insects, the resting 
place of pupse, the place of deposition of eggs. Our low plants have their 
own fauna, a very large one too, of herbivorous caterpillars, of leafmining 
Diptera, Coleoptera and Microlepidoptera, of gall insects, of the seed- 
eating species of caterpillars, of the sucking bugs and aphids ; apart from 
the plant, the two feet or so of air„space round the plants teems with the 
active flying forms, with bees and wasps, with butterflies and beetles, 
with flies and grasshoppers, all the lives that lives on and round and among 
low plants. It is this fauna which is, in moist sub-tropical India, with 
its immense flora, so extensive and which is of much greater relative im¬ 
portance in this zone than it is in tropical India. A reduplication of this 
fauna is found higher up, in or among the taller forms of vegetation, 
such as bamboos and grasses and to a large extent this fauna is quite dis¬ 
tinct if, as is true, human beings live wholly in the six feet of air space 
lying immediately over the soil, so also insects are largely restricted each 
to its particular zone, and we believe there is a very distinct and peculiar 
fauna of the air at the tree levels ; the dancing insects that may be seen 
