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A RARE KIND OF LADY-BIRDS…

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A RARE KIND OF LADY-BIRDS IX SOPHIA GALLDENS. Stones have been known to move."—MACBETH. Three golden Lady-birds have just been caught by a smart little boy in the Sophia Gardens, beneath a stone lying in the furze-thicket that faces the lake. They do not indeed belong to any of the twenty-two genera of the family of trimerous coleoptera which bears the scientific name of Coccinellidas, among which is con- spicuous above all C. septempunctata, the very common Lady-bird, with which every boy is familiar, as it is the especial favourite with children, who give them in nearly every country some pretty pet names such as, in France, Vaches a Dieu, Betes de la Vierge, Volemidi and here in England, Lady-cow, Lady-fly, Lady-bird, and in Norfolk, where the appearance of these pretty little beetles is greeted with the follow- ing refrain Bish-a-bish a barna bee, Tell me what the matter be If it be to ny away, Then come again another day. —Perhaps Welsh babes, too, are quieted with a similar lullaby, which we should like to know.—The Coccinel- lidae are all carniverous, though for this very reason they are serviceable to the farmers, destroying those troublesome plant-lice that are known to the scientific world under the name of aphides. But the golden Lady-birds which we are speaking of, and which belong to a family of pseudo-tetramerous Coleoptera called Chrysomelidae, are all phytophagous) or vegetable feeders, adorned with the most gorgeous colours—gold, red, green, blue, violet, silver, &c. Their naked larva; are commonly fixed upon the leaves of plants or trees on which they live, but in their perfect state of beetles they conceal themselves at the foot of plants, under the bark or beneath stones, as it was just the case with our golden Lady-birds (Chrysomela staphyloea, Linn., two Greek names, by the way, that mean "golden apples" and "grape berries," both nicely appropriated to the lovely appearance and round blooming face of our little creatures). After the discovery the boy had made by raising the stone, he was more than ever delighted in reading the following passage of Oliver Wendell Holmes, which we report in its quaint originality: "Did you never, in walking in the fields, come across a large flat stone, which had lain nobody knows how long just where you find it, with the grass forming a little hedge as it were all around it close to its edge and have you not, in obedience to a kind of feeling that told you it had been lying there long enough, insinuated your stick or your foot, or your fingers under its edge, and turned it over as a housewife turns a cake when she says to herself, 'It's done brown enough by this time?' What an odd revelation, and what an unforeseen and unpleasant surprise to a small community, the very existence of which you had not suspected, until the sudden dismay and scattering among its members produced by your turning the old stone over! Blades of grass flattened down, colourless, matted together as if they had been bleached and ironed, hideous crawling creatures, some of them coleopterous or horny-shelled— turtle bugs one wants to call them; some of them softer but cunningly spread out and compressed like Lepine watches, (Nature never loses a crack or a crevice, mind you, or a joint in a tavern bedstead, but she always has one of her flat-pattern live timekeepers to slide into it) black glossy crickets, with their long filaments sticking out like the whips of four-horse stagecoaches motionless, slug-like creatures, larvae perhaps, more horrible in their pulpy stillness than even in the infernal wriggle of maturity But no sooner is the stone turned, and the wholesome light of day let upon this compressed and blinded community of creeping things, than all of them that enjoy the luxury of legs—and some of them have a good many—rush round wildly, butting each other and everything in their way, and end in a general stampede for underground retreat, from the region poisoned by sunshine. Next year you will find the grass growing tall and green where the beetle had his hole the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks, as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate through their glorified body."

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THE ROYAL VISIT TO IRELAND.

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