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As with the larvæ of Capricornis and Buprestes, it is enough for the traveller to have around it the small amount of free space necessitated by its movements. Moist, soft, and easily compressible soil is to the larva of the Cigale what digested wood-pulp is to the others. It is compressed without difficulty, and so leaves a vacant space.
The Scoliae, then, whose destiny it is to hunt and paralyse under the soil the victuals for their family, require a prey made highly vulnerable by the close assemblage of the nerve-centres, as are the Weevils and Buprestes of the Cerceres; and this is why it has fallen to their lot to share among them the larvae of the Scarabaeidae.
Is it the colouring? Not at all. There is no lack of instances. What a variety of hues and metallic reflections, distributed in a host of different fashions, appear in the Buprestes that are hunted by the Cerceris celebrated by Leon Dufour. He attained great eminence as a naturalist. Cf. "The Hunting Wasps": chapter 1; also "The Life of the Spider": chapter 1.
The general law stands out very clearly from these few data: the wood-eating grubs of the Longicorns and Buprestes prepare the path of deliverance for the perfect insect, which will have merely in one case to pass a barricade of shavings or wormed wood, or in another to pierce a slight thickness of wood or bark.
Instructed by the Sirex, the Buprestes, the Longicorns, I am once again compelled to make the same suggestion. It is not that I care for the expression: the unknown cannot be named in any language. It means that the hermits in the dark know how to find the light by the shortest road; it is the confessions of an ignorance which no honest observer will blush to share.
The Luciliae flies that glitter are magnificent flies known to all of us. Their metallic luster, generally a golden green, rivals that of our finest beetles, the Rosechafers, Buprestes and leaf beetles. It gives one a shock of surprise to see so rich a garb adorn those workers in putrefaction.
I find them sometimes in a partly-constructed curved passage, beyond which the wood remains intact, sometimes at the end of the straight central gallery, choked with sawdust, which is not continued in front. These remains, with no thoroughfare before them, tell us plainly that the Sirex adopts for its exit methods not employed by the Buprestes and the Longicorns.
Bending over his reagents, he has sought to discover, according to the phrase of a philosopher, those secret retreats in which Nature is seated before her furnaces, in the depths of her laboratory; following up the metamorphoses of matter even to the wings of the Scarabaei, and observing how life, returning to her crucible the debris and ashes of the organism, combines the elements anew, and from the elements of the urine can derive, for example, by a simple displacement of molecules, "all this dazzling magic of colours of innumerable shades: the amethystine violet of Geotrupes, the emerald of the rose-beetle, the gilded green of the Cantharides, the metallic lustre of the gardener-beetles, and all the pomp of the Buprestes and the dung-beetles."
For want of sufficient data, I should have left this elbow in the shadow of a note of interrogation, had I had at my disposal only the emergence-galleries of the Longicorns and Buprestes, which are too short to lend themselves to trustworthy examination with the compasses. A lucky find provided me with the factors required.
I have against me, I admit, the Weevils and the Buprestes of the Cerceres. These mailed ones hardly give the sting a chance, save behind the prothorax, the point at which the lancet is actually directed. If I were one to stand on trifles, I might observe that in front of the prothorax, under the throat, is an accessible spot and that the Cerceres will have nothing to do with it.
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