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: CHAPTER V. WATER-TIGERS. " Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs." Richard II. In April one may find in this brook the nearly full-grown larvae of those beetles known as the Water - tigers, or Dytiscidne. These larvae are ferocious creatures, as the children of water-tigers well might be. They are strong and slender, furnished at one end of the body with a flat head marked with six ocelli and armed with a pair of sharp jaws like Larva of Dytiscus margindis. scissors, and at the other end by two breathing gills which they keep uppermost as they dart head downward through the water. Armed with his pair of shears, the gray-yellowish, two-inch-long larva goes forth to prune the animal world. Is that a polliwog ? Let us snip off his tail. It is too long. Or, if that cannot be accomplished, let us at least hold on to the polliwog till we have sucked him dry of juice. I do not think it is possible for two of these water-tiger larvae to live together in the same bottle. A battle will sooner or later occur and one will be killed. The indiscriminate slaughter of victims indulged in by these larvae soon imparts to an uncared-for jar an " ancient and fish- like smell," since the larvae do not devour their victims whole, but suck out the juice and then drop the bodies on the bottom of the jar. A keeper of these larvae will find himself called on often to perform the office of undertaker. But the sickle-jaws do not always prove all-powerful. There are individuals that refuse to be pruned by such a pair of shears. A big dragonfly larva is a match for the shears-bearer. I left one of the Dytiscidce larvae once in a bottle of large dragon-fly larvae, and when I came back the shears-bearer was himself divide into two parts. The dragon-flies had conquered. Like some of...