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The rest, the little brown barrel, broached at one end and bearing a raised lid, must therefore be an accessory integument, a sort of exceptional shell, of which I do not as yet know any other example. The Long-legged Clythra and the Four-spotted Clythra know nothing of packing their eggs in long-stemmed bundles.
The Long-legged Clythra's are a very dark brown and remind one of a thimble, a comparison which is the more exact inasmuch as they are dented with quadrangular pits, arranged in spiral series which cross one another with exquisite precision. Those of the Four-spotted Clythra are pale in colour.
As for the thing so prettily wrought by the Long-legged Clythra and the Cryptocephali, let us admit without false shame that it is made of fæcal matter. The proof is furnished by certain specimens, by no means rare in the Golden Cryptocephalus, in which the customary brown is replaced by an unmistakable green, the sign of a vegetable pulp.
If we pass an attentive lens between the two humps at the lower end, we very often see, encrusted in the earthy mass, the remains of the shell of the egg. This is the potter's mark. The arrangement of the spiral ridges, the number and the shape of the pits enable us almost to read the name of the maker, Clythra or Cryptocephalus.
Discouraged by a food which does not suit them and perhaps also tried by a season of exceptional drouth, my young potters soon relinquish their task; they die after adding a shallow rim to their pots. Only the Long-legged Clythra thrives and repays me amply for my troublesome nursing.
Cloacal passage existing in the human embryo. Clubs, used as weapons before dispersion of mankind. Clucking of fowls. Clythra 4-punctata, stridulation of. Coan, Mr., Sandwich-islanders. Cobbe, Miss, on morality in hypothetical bee-community. Cobra, ingenuity of a. Coccus. Coccyx, in the human embryo; convoluted body at the extremity of the; imbedded in the body.
It remains to decide upon the material employed. From its horny appearance there is reason to believe that the little barrel of the Taxicorn Clythra and the scales of the Four-spotted Clythra are the products of a special secretion; and, now that it is too late, I much regret that I neglected to look for the apparatus yielding this secretion in the neighbourhood of the cloaca.
At this moment, the only moment that counts in the adult insect's life, it is a good thing indeed to possess long arms, long hands, like Clythra longimana and C. longipes, as the scientific nomenclature calls them. Is the difficulty of pairing in a transversal position the explanation of the long grappling-irons thrown out to a distance?
Remember also the Eumenes' hanging egg, which swings at the end of a thread, thus protecting the grub when it takes its first mouthfuls of the heap of dangerous game. The Taxicorn Clythra provides us with a third example of eggs fitted with suspension-threads, but so far nothing has given me an inkling of the function or the use of this string.
Moreover, if any doubts remained, they would be dispelled by the following evidence: in addition to the bare, yellow eggs there are some whose base is set in a tiny brown, pitted cup, obviously the work of either the Two-spotted Cryptocephalus or the Long-legged Clythra, according to the cage, but unfinished work, which half-clothed the egg, as it left the ovaries, and then, when the dress-material ran short, or something went wrong with the machinery, allowed it to cross the outer threshold in the likeness of an acorn fixed in its cup.
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