I disinter others, soft and quite white, whose limp wing-cases open to allow the crumpled wings to spread. The most advanced of these pale sleepers boast, by way of a startling contrast, a deep-black rostrum with violet gleams. The Sacred Beetle, in the early days of his final form, begins by hardening and colouring his implements of labour: the toothed arm-pieces and the clypeus with its semi-circular notching. The Weevil likewise in the first place hardens and colours her drill. These industrious workers interest me with their preparations. Barely has the rest of the body set and crystallized before the tools of its future work acquire exceptional strength, which they owe to an early and long-protracted tempering. From the broken shells I also take nymphs and larvæ. The latter apparently will not pass beyond the first stage this year. What is the use of hurrying? The larva, no less than the adult and perhaps more so, is given to slumbering through the severities of the winter. When the poplar unfurls its sticky buds and the Cricket on the greensward strikes up the first bars of his melody, they will be ready, one and all: the forward and backward alike; faithful to the call of spring, all will come forth from the ground, eager to climb the kindly tree and to renew the leaf-rollers’ festival in the sunlight. In its pebbly, parching soil, on which the food-cylinders dry up so quickly, the Vine-weevil lags behind, exposed as she is to periods of unemployment due to the absence of properly softened food. It is in September and October that I obtain the first adults, splendid gems, enclosed, until spring, in their casket, the underground shell. At this season there is an abundance of buried nymphs and larvæ. Many of the grubs even have not yet left their cylinders; but, to judge by their size, they will hardly linger much longer. At the first frosts, all will become torpid and postpone their further development until the end of the winter. CHAPTER IX OTHER LEAF-ROLLERS Is the insect’s trade determined by the nature of the tools of which it disposes, or, on the contrary, is it independent of them? Does the organic structure govern the instincts, or do the insect’s various aptitudes hark back to origins that cannot be explained merely by the details of its anatomy? We shall obtain an answer to these questions from two other leaf-rollers, the Apoderus of the Hazel (A. coryli, Lin.) and the Attelabus (A. curculionoides, Lin.), both of them eager rivals of the cigar-makers who work the poplar and the vine. According to the Greek lexicon, the term Apoderus ought to mean ‘the flayed.’ Is this really what the author of the expression had in mind? My few books, the odd volumes of a village naturalist, do not enable me to reply. However, to me the word is explained by the insect’s colour.