In what light this fact, if true, exhibits the labours of those naturalists—as the world calls them—who, living for years amidst the life-teeming regions of the earth, have spent their whole time in constantly killing and killing, coming home, at last, with an acre of carcasses, to write a book containing hardly anything of first-hand observation—the soul of natural history—I will not pause to inquire. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: THE HERCULES BEETLE. The enormous beetle from which this illustration was drawn, though not a particularly large specimen, is six inches long, and the upper jaw measures three inches and a half.] There are many other species of beetles, the males of which are ornamented about the head and thorax with all sorts of knobs and projections, so that, with some, one might think that a one-horned or two-horned rhinoceros had undergone metempsychosis, as it is called, that its soul, that is to say, had transmigrated into the body of an insect, which latter had been fashioned so as fancifully to resemble its old one. However, as this would be a downward journey, it is more satisfactory to imagine that certain beetles have been “translated” into rhinoceroses. As to these kinds of excrescences, Darwin believed them to be of the nature of adornments, and since their owners—the males—have not been seen to use them in warfare, and indeed do not appear to fight, it is difficult to imagine any other _raison d’être_ for them. This seems all the more likely because certain flies found in the Malay Archipelago have likewise excrescences, which we have to call horns, and these too are confined to the males, though it is hardly to be imagined that they would fight in a manner to make them of service. These flies must be most extraordinary creatures to look at. They have long legs, which they draw together underneath them, so as to stand very high, and their horns are not only conspicuous by their size and shape, but also by being brightly coloured. Thus in one species they are a beautiful pink with a light stripe down the centre, and bordered on each side with black. In another the colours are yellow, black, and brown, and though _Elaphomia cervicornis_ has to be contented with black, and pale tips, yet his are the finest pair of all, being nearly as long as his body, and branched so as to look like a pair of slender and delicate stag’s horns. The other pairs are not like this, one of them being rather club-shaped, and therefore less horn-like, whilst another has an extraordinary resemblance to the antlers of an elk, which are broad and palmated, so that _it_ is the _Elaphomia alcicornis_. Here, therefore, are both horned beetles and horned flies who yet do not fight with their horns, so that unless they serve as ornaments it would be a puzzle to say what they do serve as; for as the male beetles do not fight, which