resembling exactly those of a bull, from whence its name of Onthophagus Taurus.

This and others of its family, as chiefly vernal insects, have been designated as "agreeable," despite of their unpleasing habits.

There is another set of little leaping beetles, called Histerida-also spring visitants whose exterior is really much more prepossessing than their resorts and practices would lead one to expect. Some of these present us with exceeding pretty specimens of nature's sculpture; and, from their habit of contracting the legs and antennæ immediately upon being alarmed or touched, resemble, when thus indrawn, a carved seed (usually black, or black and red) rather than a carved insect. Hence derived are their familiar names of "Pill" and "Horse-bean beetles."*

Of these, some are workers in the same unsavoury substances as the dor or clock; but a peculiar office usually allotted to this tribe is to commence the destruction of dead carcases by piercing through their skins, on which the Hister is a feeder, thus making a way for its fellow-labourers in the work of clearance.

Flies are usually the next agents of consumption, followed by a host of other beetles, of which the rearward force is composed of such as exhibit a peculiar penchant for dry bones. Amongst the latter are those called Dermestidæ, accustomed,

* Histerida.

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BEETLE SCAVENGERS.

like the Histerida, to draw in their legs and simulate death on being touched: while, acting as their assistants in discussion of bones and other desiccated remains, there come (in the form of larvæ) certain other consumers. These, when they arrive at their maturity as pretty little coloured beetles* (some black and grey and red), accustomed to frequent flowers and fragrant places, we should hardly suspect of the unpleasing but useful habitudes of their earlier days. These also put on death's semblance to escape death or danger.

Let us take now a general and conclusive view of the grand company of beetle scavengers, as instrumental to the benefit of mankind. We must have seen already the importance of their operations, even as we have slightly sketched only a few of them, and as performed only on the narrow theatre of our native soil, and must have noticed also the wondrous order observable in their sanitary works. But it is requisite to look farther to cast an eye over the whole habitable globe—before we can perceive, in anything like its true extent, the magnitude and method of insect agency,-that, especially, of beetles, as assistant to carrion-birds in the business of removing offensive objects. In this survey, there becomes apparent one beneficent provision of Nature (more properly of Nature's God), which cannot but excite our admiration,—that, namely, of the geographical distribution of insect scavengers, as observed always to be in exact accordance with the need for *Of the genus Anthrenus.

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their services. In temperate climates, where decomposition from atmospheric causes moves at so slow a rate as to require adventitious aid, their number is large; in hot and arid atmospheres, as in the Pampas of South America, where a carcase becomes dry almost before putrefaction, and where travellers can make a fire of a dead horse, they are comparatively rare.

Contemplated thus under their aspect of usefulness, much of our very natural repugnance to the gloomy habitudes or unclean propensities of the beetle Scarabæus and its indefatigable fellows, must give way to thankfulness that such creatures exist; also to admiration of that nice endowment of adapted sensations, faculties, and powers, which direct and enable them to do, in our behalf, the bidding of their Creator.

"Dreamed I, around us viewless spirits dwell,

To tune our minds and consecrate our thoughts."

IN the joyous spring-time we devoted a few words to insect Minstrelsy (that of the joyous kind), with its associate sounds, real or fancied; and, as set in motion by their spirit-stirring influence, we imagined "a dance of life" made up of associate images mingling in a merry maze before the mental eye. But where are the cheerful things of earth without their gloomy counterparts? where the budding springs without their fading autumns? and in this, the autumnal season, let us see if there

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is not to be found a choir of insect musicians whose dirge-like strains are well suited to the departing year; each with an appropriate accompaniment of gloomy or boding sounds, audible, perhaps, only to the mental ear, yet with power suffi. cient to get up a dance, not of life, but of death,-to set in motion a train of shadowy phantoms, which take hands, and foot it, not "featly," but with due solemnity.

It must be owned, however, that such mortuary music, of which the key-note may be struck even by an insect or a bird, is getting out of date, having had its day-more properly its night-with all but very children, infant or adult. Superstition, after scaring good and bad, high and low, for centuries, has, in these modern days, been scared herself by the advancing daylight of science. From baronial hall, and turret chamber, and gloomy corridor, and winding stair, she has descended to the cottage, or been kicked down to kitchen and kitchen company; and even here begins to totter, sore buffeted by missiles from the penny press. Showing symptoms of age as well as degradation, the hearing and sight of her antiquated ladyship have grown dull, ceasing, as of yore, to magnify the volume and the import of boding sounds, with their awful phantasmagoria of shadowy shapes. But before both Superstition, and the performances of which she was once the frequent getter-up, quite sink for ever from their last and lowest stages into the pit of oblivion, let us just take a passing look at the giant terrors which even insect dirge