These long-horned wood borers do not themselves bore into the wood; how could they with their long antennæ? It is their other selves, their grubs, that live deep in the solid heart wood of some oak or hickory tree. There is something strange in their solitary hermit-cell life. Think of living for two years or more in a narrow hole which shuts you in on all sides and having for a steady diet the walls of your cell to feed upon. Prisoners have burrowed under prison stockades to escape, but these larvæ deliberately leave the outer, softer sapwood in which they hatch, and start for the interior of the trunk, packing behind them with sawdust and excrement the tunnel which they eat out. The fact that the grubs of some species of these Prionids choose to live in the roots and trunks of trees which we choose to cultivate makes them our enemies, and every good orchardist knows that the only way to stop them is to dig them out or stab them with a wire run through them in their burrows. This fellow bit savagely at a pencil, and when he finally caught hold, I lifted him up as one does a bull dog, and he hung there almost as long. [Illustration] ONE OF THE LONGICORN BEETLES (_Orthosoma brunneum_, Forst.) At first glance this longhorn might pass for a Prionus, but its antennæ are very different and the shape of its broad collar or prothorax is not the same. To a trained eye they could never be confused, which cannot be said of all beetles! In fact there is perhaps no group of living organisms which scientific men have more difficulty in classifying than the beetles, unless it be the lichens on the stones and trees. Their differences are so minute and their grub lives so obscure that they have sometimes to be bred in order to determine their relationships. [Illustration] AN AMERICAN SCARAB (_Copris carolina_, Linn.) I cannot help wondering what one of the priests of ancient Egypt would think of this picture of a New World relative of his sacred scarab. To me there has always been something strangely beautiful in the veneration which the great Egyptian race has shown for thousands of years towards the humble, industrious beetle which spends its life in the droppings from Egyptian cattle. Go to Gizeh, and look at the images of the scarab beetle carved from the rarest stories the lapidary could find, mounted in the loveliest gold settings he could fashion, and reflect that the ladies of the court wore these dung beetles around their necks and were buried with them on. Was this veneration of the scarab as old, almost, as the race, and did it come with the race into its civilization, or did it arise as the whim of some great Pharaoh?