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Almost all the living families of Coleoptera are represented, but, as we might have anticipated from the preponderance of arborescent and ligneous plants, the wood-eating beetles play the most conspicuous part, the Buprestidae and other long-horned beetles being particularly abundant. Harpactor maculipes, Heer.

I once extracted it from the galleries bored by some wood-eating larva in the trunk of a dead wild pear-tree, galleries afterwards utilized for the cells of an Osmia, I do not know which. The insect in question therefore is a parasite of the Osmiæ.

The general law stands out very clearly from these few data: the wood-eating grubs of the Longicorns and Buprestes prepare the path of deliverance for the perfect insect, which will have merely in one case to pass a barricade of shavings or wormed wood, or in another to pierce a slight thickness of wood or bark.

All vestige of wood had disappeared, either through decay or perhaps through destruction by insects, for on the walls of the vault are faint traces of ancient tracks made by the comejen or wood-eating ant. On one side of the plate was engraved in rude letters: "Ua. pte. de los rtos. del pmer. Alte.

The miner guides himself by the compass in the unknown depths underground, the sailor does the same in the unknown ocean solitudes. How does the wood-eating insect guide itself in the thickness of a tree-trunk? Has it a compass? One would almost say that it had, so successfully does it keep to the quickest road. Its goal is the light.