Page:Scientific Memoirs, Vol. 1 (1837).djvu/203

 ; things must therefore indicate the order to be followed in determining the value of words. We therefore commence with insects which are only slightly connected with our subject, or upon which the ancients have furnished us with particulars from which only vague and uncertain or too general notions can be derived; and we shall pass successively to those insects which are the principal objects of our researches, and for which the texts furnish us with circumstantial details and more precise methods of determination; according to the custom of algebraists, who first eliminate from their equations the parasitic quantities, or those which furnish only imperfect data for the solution of the problems to be solved.

II. Spondyle, or Sphondyle.—Scarabaeus Melolontha of Linnæus —The Chafer (Hanneton).—Digression on the various species of Chafers known to the ancients, on several Scarabæi which are allied to that genus, and on the employment of the word Melolontha by the ancients and the moderns.

According to the order which we have marked out, the word Spondyle, or Sphondyle, claims priority.

The conclusions derived from the examination and comparison of the texts are, that the larva of this insect is sufficiently large to have been taken for a small serpent; and that it preys upon the roots of all sorts of plants, excepting that of the Aristolochia, or Wild Vine, Vitis sylvestris, which is the Clematis or another plant, but which is not the Vine.

We are acquainted with only one species of larva which fulfills these conditions; it is the common Cockchafer, so well known and so much dreaded by horticulturists under the name of the white worm. The larva of the Melolontha Fullo, or of the Melolontha vulgaris of modern naturalists, according to the results we have obtained, is the Spondyle of Aristotle and Pliny.

I find in Aldrovandus that Agricola said that the modern Greeks give the name of Spondyle to a species of worm of the size of the little finger, with the head of a reddish colour, and the body white, which is found in the earth entwined around the roots of esculent vegetables. This is certainly the larva of the Chafer. Did Agricola receive this information from modern Greeks, and is the word Spondyle still employed by them to denote the white worm?

If the Spondyle of Pliny is the same as that of Aristotle, it follows that the latter naturalist, who designated a perfect insect by this name, was acquainted with its metamorphosis; which will not appear surprising if we remember that Aristotle, as I have already observed, has exceedingly well described the metamorphosis of the Cabbage Butterfly, and that after that description he generalizes the fact, and remarks that the