INSECT SIPPERS AND GNA WERS. 253 
the tender roots of the young summer plants, and 
during the next three years fed vigorously under- 
ground, eating first what was near them and then 
making galleries in all directions, and devouring the 
roots of strawberry plants or rose-trees, oats or corn, or 
clover, till many were devoured themselves by moles 
and hedgehogs, or, if they ventured too near the 
surface of the ground, by rooks, crows, and magpies, 
which sit upon the clods and pick them out of the 
loose ground. Those which escaped and they are 
usually many burrowed down deep in the winter 
out of the way of frost and wet, to come up again 
in the spring to feed afresh. But at the end of the 
third year, after having shed their skins several times, 
they laid themselves down to rest in the earth, and 
giving out a kind of sticky froth, which they bound 
with threads of silk into a cocoon (c, Fig. 86), they 
split their last grub skin and remained as pupae or 
swaddled insects (c f \ with their imperfect wings 
folded over their legs and antennas. Then early in 
the fourth year, about April, the true cockchafer 
began to stir in the cocoon and crept out of the 
ground, hungry with its long fast, and flying up to 
the trees began to gnaw and eat for the short two 
months remaining of its life, and it is then that we 
meet with it flying from tree to tree, and browsing 
with its strong mandibles on the leaves of the oaks 
and beeches and maples. 
The history of the cockchafer is that also of many 
other beetles. The grubs of the beautiful golden 
green rose-beetle, and many others, live underground, 
feeding on the roots of plants, and the great stag- 
beetle whose sharp jaws as a grub enable him to 
