368 ANNUAL, REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 39 



tobaccos and upholstered furniture, and the drugstore beetle, which, 

 with the cigarette beetle, is the ever present foe of farinaceous food 

 products — seeds, grains, dried vegetable drug supplies, condiments, 

 and many home furnishings of vegetable origin — are so abundant 

 numerically that at times they swarm from warehouses by the millions 

 and so fill the air that the flying beetles are carried considerable dis- 

 tances by the wind and on the clothing and vehicles of travelers. 

 Others, like termites, cockroaches, and silverfish are such cosmopolitan 

 and constantly injurious pests of the home that they are accepted the 

 world over more as common household pests than as book destroyers. 



It is a source of wonder to many that books and old manuscripts 

 can be so badly damaged by insects and yet, when examined, reveal 

 not a living bookworm. So often nothing is readily visible but the 

 havoc left behind by the feeding grubs. More old books will be so 

 found than with active feeding bookworms. There is no mystery, 

 however, in this state of affairs. Nature has provided enemies of 

 bookworms in the form of tiny parasites never seen by the untrained 

 eye. They ferret out the grubs of bookworms and kill them off, 

 and after they have done their work they too pass on to other fields 

 of activity and along come the scavengers of nature, the dermestids 

 such as the cabinet beetle {Trogoderma) or the small larvae of the 

 carpet beetles {Attagenus and A?ithrenus), known better to us all as 

 destroyers of carpets and clothing, which devour most of the animal 

 tissues left in the book except the chitinou? jaws of the bookworm. 

 In many a book, completely free of bookworms but badly burrowed 

 by them, will be found the remains of cocoons of parasites to indicate 

 the battle for supremacy that occurred perhaps only a year ago, per- 

 haps 50 or a 100 years ago according to the age of the book, date of 

 original infestation, and condition of subsequent storage. Yet, 

 each book, unless too vigorously tampered with by man, carries such 

 evidence that the kind of insect causing the damage can be determined, 

 if not by the naked eye, then surely with the aid of the microscope. 



Untreated books often carry bookworms from country to country. 

 Several such instances are interesting to record, for they indicate 

 how careful persons should be in purchasing old books. In 1937 a 

 letter received from St. Leo Abbey, St. Leo, Fla., stated that many 

 books in its library were being ruined by insects. The insect causing 

 the damage ^ proved to be new to science, and a visit of investigation 

 revealed that the injured books had been presented to the Abbey from 

 the estate of Bishop Moore of St. Augustine, Fla., who died in 1901. 

 This fact, supplemented by the statement by the Rt. Rev. Abbot 

 Francis Sadlier, head of the institution at St. Leo, that books in the 

 rectory of the cathedral at St. Augusthine were infested, led the 



* Neogastrallua Wbrinoceus. 



