d made a wise choice, the epicure! This popular fungus
is one of our best mushrooms, despite its color of a doubtful white, its
skin which is often wrinkled and its gills soiled with rusty brown
at the spores. We must not judge people by appearances, nor mushrooms
either. This one, magnificent in shape and color, is poisonous; that
other, so poor to look at, is excellent.

Here are two more specialist beetles, both of small size. One is the
Triplax (Triplax russica, LIN.), who has an orange head and corselet
and black wing-cases. His grub tackles the hispid polyporus (Polyporus
hispidus, BULL.), a coarse and substantial dish, bristling at its top
with stiff hairs and clinging by its side to the old trunks of mulberry
trees, sometimes also of walnut and elm trees. The other is the
cinnamon-colored Anisotoma (Anisotoma cinnamomea, PANZ.). His larva
lives exclusively in truffles.

The most interesting of the mushroom-eating beetles is the Bolboceras
(Bolboceras gallicus, MUL.). I have described elsewhere his manner of
living, his little song that sounds like the chirping of a bird,
his perpendicular wells sunk in search of an underground mushroom
(Hydnocystis orenaria, TUL.), which constitutes his regular nourishment.
He is also an ardent lover of truffles. I have taken from between his
legs, at the bottom of his manor house, a real truffle the size of a
hazelnut (Tuber Requienii, TUL.). I tried to rear him in order to make
the acquaintance of his grub; I housed him in a large earthen pan
filled with fresh sand and enclosed in a bell cover. Possessing neither
hydnocistes nor truffles, I served him up sundry mushrooms of a rather
firm consistency, like those of his choice. He refused them all,
helvellae and clavariae, chanterelles and pezizae alike.

With a rhizopogon, a sort of little fungoid potato, which is frequent
in pine woods at a moderate depth and sometimes even on the surface, I
achieved complete success. I had strewn a handful of them on the sand of
my breeding pan. At nightfall, I often surprised the Bolboceras issuing
from his well, exploring the stretch of sand, choosing a piece not too
big for his strength and gently rolling it towards his abode. He would
go in again, leaving the rhizopogon, which was too large to take inside,
on the threshold, where it served the purpose of a door. Next day, I
found the piece gnawed, but only on the under side.

The Bolboceras does not like eating in public, in the open a