The Dynastes Goliathus, Moufet says, “like to beetles (Ateuchus sacer), hath no female, but it shapes its own form itself. It produceth its young one from the ground by itself, which Joach. Camerarius did elegantly express, when he sent to Pennius the shape of this insect out of the storehouse of natural things of the Duke of Saxony; with these verses:
A bee begat me not, nor yet did I proceed
From any female, but myself I breed.
For it dies once in a year,” continues Moufet, “and from its own corruption, like a Phœnix, it lives again (as Moninus witnesseth) by heat of the sun.
A thousand summers’ heat and winters’ cold
When she hath felt, and that she doth grow old,
Her life that seems a burden, in a tomb
O’ spices laid, comes younger in her room.”[137]
Melolonthidæ—Cock-chafers.
The family of insects, commonly called Cock-chafers, Hedge-chafers, May-bugs, and Dorrs (from the Irish dord, humming, buzzing, or from the Anglo-Saxon dora, a locust or drone) have been included by Fabricius in the genus Melolontha,—a word which retains an odd notion of the Greeks respecting them, viz., that they were produced from or with the flowers of apple-trees. It is a name also by which the Greeks themselves used to distinguish the same kind of insects.