attempts, dive into the Thames for its lengthy winter slumbers.
So, too, in lower grades of life there linger reminiscences of July. If at this time of the year we miss the noontide lullaby of insects, a familiar summer sound occasionally greets us in our evening rambles, the shard-borne beetle’s hum.
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight.
This noise generally proceeds from the wings and wing-cases of the “geotrupes stercorarius,” the common black “watchman” beetle. Pleasant as the hum is to the ear, their habits and habitations are not very savoury. If you knock one down, too, and examine him, you will often find a colony of very objectionable creatures located upon him, like poor relations feasting upon a rich uncle, and (literally in this case) eating him out of house and home. Most people, therefore, give the “watchman” a wide berth. His relative, the stag-beetle (lucanus cervus), is a much more pleasant acquaintance. A few of them occasionally flit by us in autumn before permanently removing into winter quarters, and from their social, good-natured character well merit a few words here.
From an entomological point of view, both these beetles belong to the Lamellicorns, so called from their antennæ being tipped with protuberant discs. Of this large tribe, containing more than 2000 species, above 120 occur in Britain, and amongst them are those with which most people are familiar. All through the soft summer evenings of several of the southern counties of England the stag-beetle may be observed crawling on posts or the boles of trees, and floating round the foliage. Hants and Berkshire form his head-quarters, from which he passes into the west, being occasionally taken on the Haldon Hills beyond Exeter. Being impatient of cold, they are not found in the northern English counties, nor in Scotland, but are common enough on the Continent.
Some feeding-grounds are particularly grateful to them, and here they are of course found in greatest numbers. I well remember a favourite spot of theirs in Berkshire, where a road separated a vast tract of heather from woods of oak and fir. Amongst these trees, and up and down the road, hosts of stag-beetles might be descried every evening; some exploring the ground, others, like aërial fleets sailing (this word best expresses their flight) through the balmy air round the tree-tops, and well relieved on the amber sky beyond. This flight of theirs is peculiar, and to strangers rather terrifying at first. You see two or three of the huge fellows floating up to you in a vertical position as you approach their haunts, with their threatening mandibles extended like stag’s horns, as if ready for immediate combat. In reality, however, they are, like many other large animals, exceedingly pacific, and will float on harmlessly, as though, conscious of their superior might, they remembered the poet’s words—
’Tis excellent to have a giant’s strength,
But it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.
The stag-beetle is in colour a dark chestnut shading into black; the males are two inches long, longer and with larger mandibles than the females—in direct contrast to birds of prey, where the female is generally the finer animal. On the ground their movements are sluggish; but when they open their elytra, or wing-cases, and spread out the wings of fine tissue so neatly folded under them, to the span of a couple of inches or more, they can fly very strongly. Several of them seen thus hovering over a bunch of foliage are sufficiently impressive, and help us to realise what must be the appearance of such tropical monsters as the grotesque but rare “Goliathus magnus” beetle, a specimen of which, found floating dead in the Gaboon river, may be seen in the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow.
If captured and kindly treated, stag-beetles are said to become tame in a very short time, and to display amusing traits of destructiveness on anything which falls in their way. Their mandibles are very powerful, strong enough to raise up a tumbler when placed under it. As the habits of larger animals are discerned by a glance at their teeth, the huge jaws of the stag-beetle direct us at once to his manner of life. By their aid they pierce and tear leaves or the bark of trees, and so get at the sap and juices underneath. The damage this causes to plantations is not so extensive as might at first sight be imagined. At the approach of cold weather they dig a hole in the earth, and pass the winter in seclusion; thus their ravages are not continuous, unlike those of the Scolytus destructor, which have proved so fatal to the trees of the Boulevards at Paris, and the elms in St. Giles’s at Oxford. Owls also keep down the numbers of the stag-beetle, and they form the favourite food of the great shrike.
In the tropics, where vegetation is more rank and abundant, the beetles are of corresponding strength. The prionus cervicornus takes the place of our stag-beetle in Cayenne. They resemble each other much in appearance and habits, but the exotic beetle is proportionably larger and stronger. In the steaming swamps of that country it may be seen attacking the branch of a tree or shrub with its powerful mandibles, which are edged like a saw, and flying round and round it till it has completely sawn it off.
Like many other British productions, even the stag-beetle was made subservient to Roman luxury. Latin epicures and cooks revelled in a large white grub called cossus, which they fattened to the requisite size upon flour. They describe it to us as inhabiting the interior of oak-trees. This grub is with reason identified by Kirby and others with the larva of the stag-beetle, which is hatched under the bark, and sometimes eats gradually on to the very heart of the tree. If we are inclined to wonder at such a strange taste, we may remember that to this day the palm-tree grub is eaten as a delicacy in the West Indies. In cookery, too, more than in anything else, the proverb, “Chacun à son goût,” holds good. It is lucky we can never know how many similar dainties we have unwarily consumed amongst our cauliflowers. Perhaps (though I shudder to write it) they were often the chief cause of that fine