Aristophanes, in the comedy of the Clouds, puts these words into the mouth of Socrates when speaking to Strepsiades: " Let go your thought, like the Melolontha which is launched into the air with a thread around its foot." The ancient scholiast remarks that this Melolontha is an insect of a golden colour, which children hold with a thread and cause to fly[1]. We know that in modern Greece the children at the present day attach a thread to the foot of the beautiful gold-coloured insect which naturalists call the Cetonia fastuosa, which is not scarce in that country, where the children amuse themselves with it in the same manner as those of our climates do with the common Cockchafer; the name of Melolontha should therefore have been applied to the genus Cetonia, not to the genus Chafer.
An interesting question in archdæology here arises, in connexion with the exact interpretation of a passage of Pliny, which is well worthy of attention. The Roman naturalist, speaking of the different species of amulets used in his time to cure the quartan ague, says that three sorts of Scarabæi are employed for this purpose. "The first," he says, "is the Scarabæus which rolls pills, qui pilas volvit, and in consideration of which the Scarabæi are placed among the gods by a great part of Egypt." This circumstance enables us to distinguish, without any doubt, two or three insects of the family of the Coprophagi, the Ateuchus sacer of Fabricius (Scarabæus sacer of Linnæus), or the Ateuchus laticollis, and the Ateuchus Ægyptiorum, brought from Nubia by M. Caillaud, and recently described by M. Latreille[2], who considers it exclusively as the Sacred Scarabæus so often sculptured by the Egyptians upon their monuments, and separately in hard stones of various kinds. But I think that he is mistaken; for I have recently examined all the Scarabæi of Ancient Egypt, sculptured separately, which are in the Bibliothèque du Roi, where an individual of the Ateuchus Ægyptiorum, presented by M. Caillaud, is also preserved, and I am convinced that, among the Egyptian stones representing Scarabæi with smooth elytra, a certain number have been sculptured from the Ateuchus sacer of Fabricius, and the others (a smaller number) from the Ateuchus laticollis; but all those stones which have the elytra striated, or with ribs and longitudinal furrows, have the Ateuchus Ægyptiorum of M. Caillaud for their type. Thus the name Scarabæus, of the Egyptians, is applicable to three different species, closely allied to each other certainlv, and having probably similar manners and habits, but which, notwithstanding, it is easy to distinguish in the sculptured monuments by unequivocal characters[3]. The Ateuchus sacer, which is black,
- ↑ See Camus, Notes upon Aristotle's Hist. Anim., 4to, vol. ii. p. 478.
- ↑ Caillaud, Voyage à Méroë et au Fleuve Blanc, p. 172, Atlas d'Hist. Nat. et d'Antiq., pl. 58: Latreille in Cuvier's Règne Anim., vol. iv. p. 533.
- ↑ Compare Olivier, Coléopt., vol. i. No. 3. p. 150. No. 183. pl. 8. fig. 59. var. B. The pretended var. A. is a different insect; it has a clypeus between
