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Updated: May 4, 2025
Above them were stretches of saffron-coloured hollyhocks, a flood of colour, and with these as sisters, evening primroses, a great abundance. Lilac and crimson grasshoppers rushed over them, jumping into the air and into vision, a puff of bright colour then subsiding into the greyness of the dust as they alighted and the sombre wing-cases closed over their little glory.
You have surprised this or that insect, motionless on a bough, blissfully basking in the sun. Your hand is raised, open, ready to descend on it and seize it. Hardly have you made the movement when the insect drops to the ground. It is a wearer of armoured wing-cases, slow to disengage the wings from their horny sheath, or perhaps an incomplete form, with no wing-surfaces.
The male, on his side, is fully transformed, changes his shape, acquires wings and wing-cases; nevertheless, like the female, he possesses, from the time when he is hatched, the pale lamp of the end segment. This luminous aspect of the stern is characteristic of the entire Glow-worm tribe, independently of sex and season. It appears upon the budding grub and continues throughout life unchanged.
The total length of the body is two inches and a quarter; when the wings are closed the insect has an inflated vesicular or bladder-like shape, owing to the great convexity of the thin but firm parchmenty wing-cases, and the colour is wholly pale-green. The instrument by which the Tanana produces its music is curiously contrived out of the ordinary nervures of the wing-cases.
If abstinence is its rule of life in this season of vegetable dearth, why does it emerge from underground, why does it abandon its shell, where it could sleep so peacefully, without the necessity of eating? Can it be need of food that drives it from the substratum and sends it to the sunlight so soon as the wing-cases have assumed their vermilion hue? It is very likely.
The guests do not leave the joint until the distended belly lifts the roof of the wing-cases and uncovers the nudities of the stern. Fonder of shady nooks, the Procrustes form a separate company. They drag the Snail into their lair, under the shelter of a potsherd, and there, peacefully and in common, dismember the mollusc.
We may dissect, we may scrutinize organs under the magnifying glass, examine wing-cases, count the nervures of the wings, the number of articulations in the limbs; we may reckon every point, like Réaumur forgetting not a line, not a hair; we may compare and measure every portion of the mouth, and define the class; and we shall not find a single point in all this physical architecture which will positively inform us of the habits of the insect.
This done, the organism becomes transformed to such a degree that repeated observations are required to make us believe the evidence of our eyes. I interrupt the history of the Sitares to speak of the Meloes, those uncouth Beetles, with their clumsy belly and their limp wing-cases yawning over their back like the tails of a fat man's coat that is far too tight for its wearer.
That Snake got on you whilst I flew away to consult my doctor, the White Owl, about the terrible indigestion I have. He's very difficult to catch awake; for he's out all night and sleepy all day. He says cockchafers have caused it. The horny wing-cases and legs are most indigestible, he assures me.
"Bramble-bees and Others": chapter 8. The scanty fare makes a wretched dwarf of the offspring belonging to either sex, without depriving them of any of their racial features. We still see the Burnt Zonitis, with the distinctive sign of the species: the singed patch at the tip of the wing-cases. "The Glow-worm and Other Beetles": chapter 6.
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