54 OBJECTIONS ANSWERED. 



A similar augury as to the harvest is drawn hy the Danish peasants from 

 the mites which infest the common dung beetle (Geotrupes stercorarius), 

 called in Danish Sharnhosse 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 {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 ^ ; 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 Lepidoptera, when they 

 emerge from the pupa state, discharge from their anus a redish fluid, which, 

 in some instances, where their numbers have been considerable, has pro- 

 duced the appearance of a shower of blood ; and by this natural fact, all 

 those bloody showers, recorded by historians as preternatural, and regarded 

 where 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 vast 

 multitude of butterflies swarmed through a great part of Germany, and 

 sprinkled plants, leaves, buildings, clothes, and men, with bloody drops, as 

 if it had rained blood.^ But the most interesting account of an event of 

 this kind is given by Reaumur, from whom we learn that in the beginning 

 of July, 1608, the suburbs of Aix, and a considerable extent of country 

 round it, were covered with what appeared to be a shower of blood. We 

 may conceive the amazement and stupor of the populace upon such a dis- 

 covfery, the alarm of the citizens, the grave reasonings of the learned. 

 All agreed however in attributing this appearance to the powers of dark- 

 ness, and in regarding it as the prognostic and precursor of some direful 

 misfortune about to befall them. Fear and prejudice would have taken 

 deep root upon this occasion, and might have produced fatal effects upon 

 some weak minds, had not M. Peiresc, a celebrated philosopher of that 

 place, paid attention to insects. A chrysalis which he preserved in his 

 cabinet let him into the secret of this mysterious shower. Hearing a flut- 

 tering, which informed him his insect was arrived at its perfect state, he 

 opened the box in which he kept it. The animal flew out and left behind 

 it a red spot. He compared this with the spots of the bloody shower, and 

 found they were alike. At the same time he observed there was a prodi- 

 gious quantity of butterflies flying about, and that the drops of the miracu- 

 lous rain were not to be found upon the tiles, nor even upon the upper 

 surface of the stones, but chiefly in cavities and places where rain could 



^ Detharding de Insectis Coleopteris Danicis, 9. 



* Reaum. ii. 289. This insect and its caterpillar is finely figured in Mr. Curtis's elegan 

 and scientific British Entomology, t. 147. 



3 Faun. Suec. 822. * Nat. Hist, of Barbad. 85. 



* Quoted in Mouffet, 107. 



