is the principal way in which male creatures, including man, show their vigour, why should we suppose them to be more vigorous than the females? In some other beetles, which do fight, the sexes do not differ conspicuously, nor do their facial or other peculiarities appear to bear any special relation to warfare. Thus “those curious little beetles, the _Brenthidæ_” of the Malay Archipelago, have an extraordinarily long snout—or rostrum, to talk entomologically—at the end of which come the jaws and antennæ, and this rostrum is used by the female to bore holes in decaying wood, where she afterwards deposits her eggs. The males, however, do what they can with them as weapons, and Dr. Wallace has seen two of them fighting together in a very comic manner. “Each,” he tells us, “had a fore-leg laid across the neck of the other, and the rostrum bent quite in an attitude of defiance, and looking most ridiculous.”[70] On another occasion “two were fighting for a female, who stood close by busy at her boring. They pushed at each other with their rostra, and clawed and thumped, apparently in the greatest rage, although their coats of mail must have saved both from injury. The small one, however, soon ran away, acknowledging himself vanquished.”[70] _Lethrus cephalotes_ is another fighting beetle, and here the males, instead of horns or anything extraordinary, have merely somewhat larger mandibles than the females. “The two sexes,” says Darwin, “inhabit the same burrow. If, during the breeding season, a strange male attempts to enter the burrow he is attacked; the female does not remain passive, but closes the mouth of the burrow and encourages her mate by continually pushing him on from behind; and the battle lasts until the aggressor is killed or runs away.”[71]