THE USES OF BEETLES.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3203, 4 October 1881, Page 4

THE USES OF BEETLES.

Beetles may bo said to perform the function in nature of universal scavengers, chiefly with regard to the smaltar quantities of animal and vegetable matter neglected by the larger animals, but-not always, their email size and very varied forms and instincts enabling them to attack, by methods impossible to the other animals, and to clear from earth's surface, and carcases even of large quadrupeds and the dead trunks of the largest forest trees. Different groups are organised respectively for terrestrial and aquatic life, and for every shade of variety in each ; for living in or feeding nn vegetable substances, from the smallest cryptogams, to the root, bark, wood, fruit, and seed of the highest forms of vegetation ; and for disposing of excrementitious as well as dead animal substances. All forms of locomotion are displayed; many are specially adapted for burrowing, and for such curious operations a3 sawing branches or drilling holes in solid wood. There are predacious groups—terrestrial, arboreal, and aqxiatic—and groups parasitio of the living bodies of other insects; there are separate sets of alpine, forest, field, and desert forms, in almost every climate, and there is a special beetle fauna inhabiting the remotest recesses of lime-stone cavarns. In size, beetles present all gradations, from a length of one-thirtieth of an inch to half a foot. Such being the wild range in modes of existence, and the consequent diversity of adapted forms, it is not to be wondered at that the number of species of Coleoptera 13 very large. BTo fewer, indeed, than 80,000 epecies have been already described, and all our larger collections contain many that are still unpublished. It is estimated by Professor Westwood that the total number existing in nature is not less than 100,000 ; this one order of insects ia there Pore nearly ten times as numerous as the whole class of birds, and more than double the whole of the vertebrata.—Cassell's Natural History.