The above facts are quite reliable, but having made my notes, I forgot to mention their source—one of the established entomological organs—and so cannot now refer to it. Footnote 141: Annals and Magazine of Natural History, September, 1874. Footnote 142: The Faerie Queene, book 2, canto vi. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXIV Aquatic insects—Lyonnet’s water-beetle—A floating cradle—Larva and pupa—An ingenious contrivance—Nothing useless—The imaginary philosopher—How the cradle is made—The mysterious “mast”—Later observation—The giant water-bug—An oppressed husband. SPIDERS having brought us to the water, it may be as well, or even better, in view of the title of this work, to say something about water-insects. Of these, so long as the water be fresh, and not salt, there are many, and the largest, perhaps, if he exceeds some of the dragon-fly larvæ and the Giant Water-Bug of America, must be the Great Water-Beetle—_Hydrophilus piceus_—which is larger even than the much commoner one—_Dytiscus_—which everybody knows, and which is _the_ water-beetle to most people. It is the fate of some animals to become associated for all time in our minds with the name of some particular man, as, for instance, the bee is with that of Huber, and the ephemera with that of Swammerdam. Again, the fame of Lyonnet, though he was skilled in eight languages, and became cypher secretary and confidential translator to the United Provinces of Holland, is principally bound up with a certain caterpillar, viz. that of the goat moth, of which creature, though only an amateur in such matters, he made dissections and executed plates, which have never yet been surpassed, and are supposed to be entirely unsurpassable. In a lesser degree his memory is associated with this particular water-beetle—the great one, into the heart of whose mystery he was the first to pierce: “In the beginning of July,” he tells us, “I had noticed in the ditches a kind of cocoon which I did not recognise. It was whitish, of the size of the end of the finger, nearly spherical, but rather oval and flattened. The surface, which looked like tow, was not quite smooth. One of the two ends was flatter than the other, and furnished with a raised rim. From the space within this rim projected a sort of little tapering mast about as long as the cocoon.”[143]