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A perfect series can be formed from the best-provided to the worst-provided or degenerate males. Although the mandibles of the common stag-beetle, and probably of many other species, are used as efficient weapons for fighting, it is doubtful whether their great size can thus be accounted for. We have seen that they are used by the Lucanus elaphus of N. America for seizing the female.
The presence of these two butterflies, and partly of the stag-beetle, along the south-east coast of England as far as the primeval forests of South Lincolnshire, points, as do a hundred other facts, to a time when the Straits of Dover either did not exist, or were the bed of a river running from the west; and when, as I told you just now, all the rivers which now run into the German Ocean, from the Humber on the west to the Elbe on the east, discharged themselves into the sea between Scotland and Norway, after wandering through a vast lowland, covered with countless herds of mammoth, rhinoceros, gigantic ox, and other mammals now extinct; while the birds, as far as we know, the insects, the fresh-water fish, and even, as my friend Mr.
He inspected everything of canine interest; sniffing expert inquiry at holes which might prove to be rabbit warrens; glaring in truculent threat up some tree which might or might not harbor an impudent squirrel; affecting to see objects of mysterious import in bush clumps; crouching in dramatic threat at a fat stag-beetle which scuttled across his path.
Then he went on, under the shadow of a great stack, and found a caterpillar crawling along. "How beautiful the world is!" said the caterpillar: "the sun is so warm, and everything so enjoyable! And when I go to sleep, and die, as they call it, I shall wake up as a butterfly, with beautiful wings to fly with." "How conceited you are!" exclaimed the stag-beetle. "Fly about as a butterfly, indeed!
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