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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: are generally much larger than the males, and often want the coppery polish of the latter. They measure from eight tenths of an inch to one inch and one tenth in length. They are nocturnal insects, and conceal themselves during the day in the crevices and hollows of trees, where they feed upon the sap that flows from the bark. They have the odor of Russia leather, and give this out so powerfully, that their presence can be detected, by the scent alone, at the distance of two or three yards from the place of their retreat. This strong smell suggested the name Osmoder- ma, that is scented skin, given to these beetles by the French naturalists. They seem'particularly fond of the juices of cherry and apple trees; in the hollows of which I have often discovered them. Their larvae live in the hollows of these same trees, feeding upon the diseased wood, and causing it more rapidly to decay. They are whitish fleshy grubs, with a reddish hard-shelled head, and closely resemble the grubs of the common dor-beetle. In the autumn each one makes an oval cell or pod, of fragments of wood, strongly cemented with a kind of glue; it goes through its transformation within this cell, and comes forth in the beetle form in the month of July. We have another scented beetle, equal in size to the preceding, of a deep mahogany-brown color, perfectly smooth, and highly polished, and the male has a deep pit before the middle of the thorax. This species of Osmoderma is called eremicola, a name that cannot be rendered literally into English by any single word; it signifies wilderness-inhabitant, for which might be substituted hermit. I believe that this insect lives in forest-trees, but the larva is unknown to me. The family Lucanid.e, or Lucanians, so named from the Lin- naean genus Lucanus, must be ...

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