

452 THE INSECT WORLD. 
continues to do so during the two following years, changing its 
skin many times during the period. Towards the end of the third 
year, it changes into a pupa, after having surrounded itself with 
2 shell consolidated with a glutinous froth and some threads of silk. 
The pupa (Fig. 434) is of a pale russety yellow, with two little 
points at the extremity of its body; the elytra and the wings, 
lying down, cover the legs and the antenne. 
Towards the end of October the perfect msect is already marked 
out, but it is still soft and weak. It passes the winter in its 
hiding-place, hardens and becomes coloured at the end of the 
winter, and shows itself by degrees on the surface of the ground. 
In the month of April, three years after its birth, the cockchafer 
emerges from the earth, and commences its attacks on the leaves 
of trees. This long duration of the development of the insect 
explains why we do not see them every year in the same 
number. When they have once appeared in great quantities, it 1s 
not for three years afterwards that we need expect to see their 
progeny again in proportionate numbers. It is then every three 
years that we have a cockchafer year, like 1865, but in the inter- 
mediate years they are never very abundant. For the first 
year the little larvae do not eat much. They feed then princi- 
pally on fragments of dung, and on vegetable detritus, and 
keep together in families. In winter they bury themselves 
deeply, so as to be secure against frost and floods. Next spring 
the want of a greater abundance of food forces them to disperse. 
They then make subterranean galleries in all directions, without, 
however, going far from the place where they were hatched, 
They begin attacking the roots which they find within their reach: 
the damage they do increasing with their size and the strength 0: 
their mandibles. Among roots, they seem to prefer those of the 
strawberry, and of rose trees; but they do not despise other vege 
tables, and attack legumes and cereals as well as bushes and plants 
The ravages which they occasion are sometimes incalculable; marke 
gardens are sometimes entirely devastated. Fields of lucerne have 
been seen partially destroyed by them, meadows of great exten 
lose their pasturage, oat fields die off before they have come t 
maturity, and many of the ears of corn fall before they are cut. 
In proportion as they increase in age and in strength, especially 
x 
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