34 OBJECTIONS ANSWERED. 



called in Danish Skanibosse or Torbist. If there are 

 many of these mites between the fore feet, they believe 

 that there will be an early harvest, but a late one if they 

 abound between the hind feet^. The appearance of 

 the death's head hawk-moth i^Acherontia Atropos) has in 

 some countries produced the most violent alarm and 

 trepidation amongst the people, who, because it emits 

 a plaintive sound, and is marked with what looks like a 

 death's head upon its back, regarded it as the messenger 

 of pestilence and death''. We learn from Linne that a 

 similar superstition, built upon the black hue and strange 

 aspect of that beetle, prevails in Sweden with respect to 

 Blaps mortisaga, L. '^; and in Barbadoes, according to 

 Hughes, the ignorant deem the appearance of a certain 

 grasshopper in their houses as a sure presage of illness 

 to some of the family ''. 



One would not think that the excrements of insects 

 could be objects of terror, yet so it has been. Many 

 species of Lepidoptcra, when the}' emerge from the pupa 

 state, discharge from their anus a reddish fluid, which, in 

 some instances, where their numbers have been consider- 

 able, has produced the appearance of a shower of blood ; 

 and by this natural fact, all those bloody showers, re- 

 corded by historians as preternatural, and regarded wliere 

 they happened as fearful prognostics of impending evils, 

 are stripped of their terrors, and reduced to the class of 

 events that happen in the common course of nature. 

 That insects are the cause of these showers is no recent 

 discovery; for Sleidan relates that in the year 1553 a 



" Dctliarding de Insectis Coleopteris Danicis, 9. 

 *" Rcaum. ii. 289. This insect and its caterpillar is finely figured 

 ill Mr. Curtis's elegant and scientific Ihitish E Htomolngj/, t. 147. 

 ' Fauii. Suec. S22. '^ Not. Hist, of BarbacL^Ho. 



