Insects abroad : being a popular account of foreign insects, their structure, habits, and transformations . lypunctated. The legs, like the body,are parti-coloured, the thighs andtarsus being black, and the tibiawhite. The generic name of Tophoderesrefers to the peculiar black and whitecolouring of the upper surface. It iscomposed of two Greek words, thelatter of which means a skin orexternal surface, and the othersignifies a kind of mottled stone, which is known to mineralo-gists by the name of tufa, or tuff-stone, this being a corrup-tion of the Greek tophos. The Latin word tophus is onlyano
Insects abroad : being a popular account of foreign insects, their structure, habits, and transformations . lypunctated. The legs, like the body,are parti-coloured, the thighs andtarsus being black, and the tibiawhite. The generic name of Tophoderesrefers to the peculiar black and whitecolouring of the upper surface. It iscomposed of two Greek words, thelatter of which means a skin orexternal surface, and the othersignifies a kind of mottled stone, which is known to mineralo-gists by the name of tufa, or tuff-stone, this being a corrup-tion of the Greek tophos. The Latin word tophus is onlyanother form of the same word. On looking at the figure of the last-mentioned insect, thereader will probably notice that the antenna? are muchlengthened. This elongation extends through many of the alliedspecies, some of which are so exactly like the Longicorn Beetlesthat it is scarcely possible to imagine them to be Weevils, Themost remarkable species at present of these long-hornedWeevils is that which ia represented in the illustration on thenext page, and known by the name of Xenocerus Fio. 93.—Tophoderes frenatus.(Black and white.) LONG-HOKNED WEEVILS. 197 The former of the two names seems to have been composedmuch as Dickens author composed his work on Chinese meta-physics, by taking a cyclopaedia and reading the article Chinaunder the letter C, Metaphysics under the letter if, and com-bining his information. The author has evidently got hold of anEuglish-Greek lexicon, and, wanting an equivalent for strange-horned, looked for the word strange, or stranger, under theletter S, and found Xenos. Then he looked for horn underthe letter H, and found Keras. Then, by combining his in-formation, he formed the word Xenocervs, not in the leastseeing that Xenos signifies a stranger, a guest, or astranger in the house, and has nothing to do with the wordstrange in the sense of exceptional or wonderful, thatbeing evidently the meaning which the writer meant to con
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1880, booksubjectinsects, bookyear1883
