Let us pass on to others. Who is this, assiduous visitor, but appearing only in small parties, hardly more than four or five at a time? It is an Hemipteron, [22] a slender Bug, with red wings and with stout, toothed thighs to its hind-legs; it is the Spurred Alydus (A. calcaratus, Linn.), a near kinswoman of the Reduvius, so interesting because of her explosive egg. [23] She too has an appetite for game, but how moderate compared with the other’s! I see her wandering over my specimens in search of a denuded bone bleached by the sun. After finding a suitable point she applies the tip of her rostrum to it and for some time remains motionless. With her rigid implement, fine as a horse-hair, what can she extract from that bone? I ask myself in vain, so dry does the surface exploited appear to be. Perhaps she collects the vestiges of grease left by the Dermestes’ conscientious tooth. Quite a secondary worker, she gleans where others have reaped. I should have liked to follow this bone-sucker’s habits more closely and above all to obtain her eggs, in the hope of discovering some little mechanical secret at the moment of hatching. My attempts failed. When imprisoned in a glass jar with the victuals which she requires, the Alydus allows herself to pine away from one day to the next. She needs to fly in freedom over the neighbouring rosemary-bushes, after her sojourn in the retting-vats. We will close this list of undertakers’ assistants with the Staphylini, [24] the tribe with the short wing-cases. Two species, both inmates of dung-hills, haunt my earthenware pans: Aleochara fuscipes, Fab., and Staphylinus maxillosus, Linn. My attention is drawn rather to the latter, the family giantess. Barred with ash-grey velvet on a black ground, the Big-jawed Staphylinus reaches me only in small numbers, always one by one. She flies up hastily, perhaps from the stables hard by. She alights, coils her belly, opens her pincers and dives impetuously into the Mole’s fur. Then, with her powerful nippers, she punctures the skin, now blue and distended by gases. The sanies oozes out. The glutton greedily eats her fill; and that is all. Soon she departs, as suddenly as she came. I have not had the good fortune to see anything further. The big Staphylinus hastens to my pans only to feast upon a highly seasoned dish. Her family dwelling must be in the dung-hills about the stables of the neighbourhood. I should have much liked to see her make her home in my charnel-pits. The Staphylinus is a curious creature indeed. Her short wing-cases, covering just the top of her shoulders, her fierce mandibles, overlapping like a meat-hook, and her long, naked abdomen, which she lifts and brandishes in the air, make her a being apart, of alarming aspect. I should like to learn something of her larva. As I cannot do this with the Beetle that visits my Moles, I apply myself to a kindred species, as nearly as possible her equivalent in respect of size.