Definition of "dermestes" []

• A genus of coleopterous insects, the larvæ of which feed animal substances. They are very destructive to dries meats, skins, woolens, and furs. The most common species is Dermestes lardarius, known as the bacon beetle. (noun)

Gnu Collaboartive International Dictionary of English: licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

• "No creature known to man possesses more intense vitality than the _dermestes_ beetle which propagates in the skull of a mummy."
• "Now in the very same sense, and no other, than that in which the writer himself by implication compares himself as a man to the _dermestes typographicus_, or the _fucus scorpioides_, do I compare the principle of Life to magnetism, electricity, and constructive affinity, — or rather to that power to which the two former are the thesis and antithesis, the latter the synthesis."