“I myself kept bugs for five years and a half without food, and a housekeeper at Lord H----’s informed me that an old bedstead that I was then moving from a store-room was taken down forty-five years ago, and had not been used since, but the bugs in it were still numerous, though as thin as living skeletons. They couldn’t have lived upon the sap of the wood, it being worm-eaten and dry as a bone. A bug will live for a number of years, and we find that when bugs are put away in old furniture without food, they don’t increase in number; so that, according to my belief, the bugs I just mentioned must have existed forty-five years: besides, they were large ones, and very dark colored, which is another proof of age. “It is a dangerous thing for bugs when they are shedding their skins, which they do about four times in the course of a year; when they throw off their hard shell and have a soft coat, so that the least touch will kill them; whereas at other times they will take a strong pressure. I have plenty of bug-skins, which I keep by me as curiosities, of all sizes and colors, and sometimes I have found the young bugs collected inside the old ones’ skins for warmth, as if they had put on their father’s great-coat. There are white bugs--albinoes you may call ’em--freaks of nature like.”[925] Notonectidæ--Water-boatmen. Humboldt mentions that he saw insects’ eggs sold in the markets of Mexico, which were collected on the surface of lakes. Under the name of _Axayacat_, these eggs, or those of some other species of fly, deposited on rush mats, are sold as a caviare in Mexico. Rev. Thomas Smith, who makes the same statement, also says the Mexicans likewise eat the flies themselves, ground and made up with saltpetre. Something similar to these eggs, found in the pools of the desert of Fezzan, serves the Arabs for food, having the taste of caviare. In the Bulletin de la Société Impériale Zoologique d’Acclimation, M. Guerin Méneville has published a paper on a sort of bread which the Mexicans make of the eggs of three species of heteropterous insects.