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Updated: June 4, 2025
By no means: merely to taste its flesh, and, if they find it agreeable, to perform the most radical cure of its ills by devouring it. It is possible, therefore, that the Gardener with the injured wing-covers had tempted his fellows by the sight of his imperfectly covered back. They saw in their defenceless comrade a permissible subject for dissection.
With his long hind legs, spurred and laced with red, he stamps with impatience and kicks out at nothing. Emotion renders him silent. His wing-covers are nevertheless in rapid motion, but are no longer sounding, or at most emit but an unrhythmical rubbing sound. Presumptuous declaration!
Nothing is left but the closed boat-shaped wing-covers and the fore parts of the body. The empty shell is left lying on the scene of the tragedy. In this way must have perished the beetles always males whose remains I find in the cage from time to time; thus the survivors also will perish.
The abdomen is disproportionately distended; swollen, apparently, by the reserve of organisable humours which the expansion of the wings and wing-covers will presently employ. Meanwhile the creature rests and recovers from its exertions. Twenty minutes of waiting elapse.
Its comrades have attacked it during the night and have cleaned out its abdomen, insufficiently protected by the damaged wing-covers. The operation has been performed very cleanly, without any dismemberment. Claws, head, corselet, all are correctly in place; the abdomen only has a gaping wound through which its contents have been removed.
Standing one day in the shadow of the plane-trees that grow before my door, I see a Golden Gardener go by as if on pressing business. The pilgrim is well met; he will go to swell the contents of my vivarium. In capturing him I notice that the extremities of the wing-covers are slightly damaged. Is this the result of a struggle between rivals? There is nothing to tell me.
But no: to my surprise and confusion, matters do not fall out as I foresaw. For a few minutes the insects bustle about in the sunlight, opening and closing their wing-covers to ease the mechanism of flight; then one by one they fly away, mounting in the luminous air; they grow smaller and smaller to the sight, and are quickly lost to view.
The wing-covers are both formed of a dry, broad membrane, diaphanous and as fine as the white skin on the outside of an onion, which is capable of vibrating over its whole area. Their shape is that of the segment of a circle, cut away at the upper end.
First one wing is rubbed over the other, and then the movement is reversed. Both wings are raised a little at the same time, so as to increase the resonance. In some species the wing-covers of the males are furnished at the base with a talc-like plate. With respect to the formation of these teeth, Dr.
With as much certainty as though I had him before my eyes at the moment when he divests himself of his nymphal swaddling-bands, I see him a dull red, rusty or crimson, excepting on the wing-covers and the abdomen, which are at first colourless and presently turn the same colour as the rest.
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