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Updated: May 4, 2025
It passes upward, says the Reverend P.B. Brodie, into a shale containing Cypris and Estheria, and is full of the wing-cases of several genera of Coleoptera, with some nearly entire beetles, of which the eyes are preserved.
The Sarcophagi, or grey flesh flies, "with red bloodshot eyes, and the stony gaze of a knacker"; the Saprinidae, "with bodies of polished ebony like pearls of jet"; the Silpha aplata, with large and sombre wing-cases in mourning; the shiny slow-trotting Horn-beetle; the Dermestes, "powdered with snow beneath the stomach"; the slender Staphylinus; the whole fauna of the corpse, the whole horde of artisans of death, "intoxicating themselves with purulence, probing, excavating, mangling, dissecting, transmuting, and stamping out infection."
This is a pretty little black beetle, with a pale, velvety abdomen; a spherical insect, as large as a biggish cherry-stone. Its official title is Bolboceras gallicus, Muls. By rubbing the end of the abdomen against the edge of the wing-cases it produces a gentle chirping sound like the cheeping of nestlings when the mother-bird returns to the nest with food.
Nothing can be plainer than that wings are formed for flight, yet in how many insects do we see wings so reduced in size as to be utterly incapable of flight, and not rarely lying under wing-cases, firmly soldered together!
The same backward movement being continued, the spine, by the full action of the muscles, was bent like a spring; and the insect at this moment rested on the extremity of its head and wing-cases.
But the hunter knows the weak point of the horn-clad prey, the fine skin protected by the wing-cases. By means of attacks which the assailant renews as soon as they are repulsed by the assailed, the Carabus contrives to raise the cuirass slightly and to slip his head beneath it. From the moment that the pincers have made a gash in the vulnerable skin, the Rhinoceros is lost.
The projecting portions of both wing-cases are traversed by a similar strong nervure, but this is scored like a file only in one of them, in the other remaining perfectly smooth.
A jackdaw chuckled overhead; a far sheep bleated; a great beetle, with black wing-cases flung back, roared by. For the rest, all was silence and despair. He had hoped greatly; he had tried hard; and failed utterly. Above all he had not eaten for twenty-four hours. The boy sat down and wept. About him in the turf the grasshoppers kept up their accursed zig-a- zig. Little cads!
In no instance has any stomach been found to digest it save an insect's some naturalists thinking that certain beetles make their horny wing-cases of that. I believe one man did think he had discovered a solvent for it in the gastric juice of the beaver, but that view is not widely entertained.
Parts of the apparatus were spinning very rapidly, and gave one a hazy effect of transparent wings; but parts, including two peculiarly curved "wing-cases" if one may borrow a figure from the flying beetles remained expanded stiffly. In the middle was a long rounded body like the body of a moth, and on this Mr. Butteridge could be seen sitting astride, much as a man bestrides a horse.
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