Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 July 2009
In March 1920 my attention was called by Dr. F. W. Dootson, University Lecturer in Chemistry, to the fact that a beetle was breeding in numbers in a jar of argol in the Chemical Laboratory of Cambridge University. The insect proved on examination to be the introduced Ptinid, Trigonogenius globulum, Solier, a form related to the household insect, Niptus hololeucus, to which it bears at first sight a slight resemblance.
* Described by Solier in C. Gay’s “Historia de Chile,” iv, 1849, p. 464. I have retained Solier’s original spelling of the specific name, though in some later works globulum is altered to globulus, which is probably more correct. Solier called the species globulum, but at the same time named a variety of it globosus. Why he gave the former name the neuter ending is difficult to say. He may have intended globulum to be a noun, but in several dictionaries of classical and late Latin which I have seen, the only form of the word is a late Latin noun, globulus.
† In some of the argol which was put into a glass-stoppered bottle, filling it up to the stopper and leaving no air-space, all the insects died.