If the housing were inadequate, one could put down this brutality to the terrified hustling of a mob of maddened creatures; but one can no longer do so when a roomy cage leaves the two captives ample space for their nocturnal rambles. They lack nothing in the wire dome but liberty of flight. Could this deprivation tend to embitter their character? How far removed are they from the Common Capricorn! He, though he form one of a dozen huddled under the same dish-cover, for a month on end, without any neighbours’ quarrel, bestrides his companion, and, from time to time, caresses her with a lick of his tongue on her back. Other people, other customs. I know one who rivals the insect of the pines in that barbarous propensity for mutilating its fellows. This is the Ægosoma (Æ. scabricorne, Fab.), who likewise is a lover of darkness and sports a pair of long horns. His grub lives in the wood of old willows hollow with age. The adult is a handsome insect, attired in bright brown and bearing a pair of very fierce antennæ. With the Capricorn and Ergates, he is the most noteworthy of all the Longicorns in the matter of size. In July, at about eleven o’clock on a warm, still night, I find him crouching flat on the inside of the cavernous willows or oftener on the outside, on the rough bark of the trunk. The males occur pretty frequently. Motionless, undismayed by the sudden flashes of my lantern, they await the coming of the females lurking in the deep crevices of the decayed wood. The Ægosoma also is armed with powerful shears, with mandibular cleavers which are very useful to the new-formed adult for hewing a way out, but which become a crying abuse among insects of the same family, when addicted to chopping off each other’s legs and antennæ. If I do not isolate my subjects one by one in strong paper bags, I am certain, on returning from my nocturnal expeditions, to find none but cripples in my box. The mandibular knife has done furious execution on the way. Almost all the insects are the poorer by at least a leg. In the wire cage, with chips of old willow-wood for a refuge and figs, pears and other fruits for food, they are less intolerant. For three or four days, my captives betray great excitement at nightfall. They run swiftly along the trellised dome, quarrelling as they go, biting one another, striking at one another with their cleavers. In the absence of females, almost undiscoverable at the time of my visits, which are possibly not late enough, I have not been able to observe their nuptials; but I have seen acts of brutality that tell me something of what I want to know. No less expert in chopping off legs than his kinsman of the pines, the Ægosoma should also be somewhat deficient in gallantry. I picture him beating his wife and crippling her a little, not without himself receiving his share of wounds.