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Consider the male and female Geotrupes, which prepare together the patrimony of their larvæ; in their case the father assists his companion with the pressure of his robust body in the manufacture of their balls of compressed nutriment. These domestic habits are astonishing amidst the general isolation.
He recovers during the night; and next day I find him in possession of his usual activity. The ether experiment, which I took care to stop at the moment when it produced the desired effect, has not been fatal to him; but it has had much more serious consequences for him than for the Geotrupes.
It becomes black on the dorsal surface of the Stercoraceous Geotrupes and the Mimic Geotrupes; and, with a quick change, it turns into amethyst under the belly of the first and into copper pyrites under the belly of the second. It covers the back of Cetonia floricola with golden bronze and the under surface with metallic purple.
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."
No; the prizes of life do not fall to the share of the useful. Necrophori and Geotrupes devote themselves to works of general salubrity; and these two corporations, so interesting in the accomplishment of their hygienic functions, so remarkable for their domestic morality, are given over to the vermin of poverty.
The insect presents a misshapen appearance under this overcoat of vermin, which my hair-pencil can hardly brush aside. Driven off the belly, the horde make the tour of the sufferer and encamp on his back, refusing to relinquish their hold. I recognize among them the Beetle's Gamasis, the Tick who so often soils the ventral amethyst of our Geotrupes.
Landois, H., gnats attracted by sound; on the production of sound by the Cicadae; on the stridulating organ of the crickets; on Decticus; on the stridulating organs of the Acridiidae; stridulating apparatus, in Orthoptera; on the stridulation of Necrophorus; on the stridulant organ of Cerambyx heros; on the stridulant organ of Geotrupes; on the stridulating organs in the Cleoptera; on the ticking of Anobium.
If every species has its law; if the Geotrupes remain faithful to filth, although experience shows that they can accommodate themselves equally well to the putrefaction of decayed leaves; if the predatory species the Cerceris, the Sphex, the Ammophila resort only to one species of quarry to nourish their larvae, although these same larvae accept all indifferently, it is on account of those superior economic laws and secret alliances the profound reasons for which as a rule escape us or are beyond the scope of our theories.
Since direct exposure to the sun, owing to the excess of heat, is fatal to the delicate process of the nymphosis, I shaded the solar rays with a screen of water contained between slips of glass; and to the bright light thus moderated in temperature I daily, throughout the period of chromatic evolution, subjected a number of Sacred Beetles, Geotrupes and Cetoniæ.
The Buprestis emerging from the depths of the trunk in which he has spent his larval life; the Geotrupes and the Phanæus leaving their natal burrows possess their final adornments, which will not become richer in the rays of the sun, at the time when they make their appearance in the open air.
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