364 MISCELLANEOUS. 



• A diseased woman at Patton, drinking of the water in 

 which the bones of St. Milburge were washed, there came 

 from her stomach "a filthie worme, ugly and horrible to be- 

 hold, having six feete, two homes on his head, and two on 

 his tayle." Brother Porter, in his Flowers of the Saints, 

 tells this, and adds that the " worme was shutt up in a hol- 

 low piece of wood, and reserved afterward in the monaste- 

 rie as a trophy and monument of S. Milburg, untill, by the 

 lascivious furie of him that destroyed all goodness in Eng- 

 land, that with other religious houses and monasteries, went 

 to ruin." Hence the "filthie worme" was lost, and we have 

 nothing now instead but the Reformation.^ 



Capt. Clarke, in his passage from Dublin to Chester, on 

 the 2d of September, 1733, met with a cloud "of flying in- 

 sects of various sorts," which stuck about the rigging of the 

 vessel in a surprising manner.^ 



De Geer, chamberlain to the King of Sweden, writes 

 (iv. 63) that in January, 1749, at Leufsta, in Sweden, and 

 in three or four neighboring parishes, the snow was covered 

 with living worms and insects of various kinds. The peo- 

 ple assured him they fell with the snow, and he was shown 

 several that had dropped on people's hats. He caused the 

 snow to be removed from places where these worms had 

 been seen, and found several which seemed to be on the sur- 

 face of the snow which had fallen before, and were covered 

 by the succeeding. It was impossible that they could have 

 come there from under the ground, which was then frozen 

 more than three feet deep, and absolutely impervious to 

 such insects. In 1750, he again discovered vast quantities 

 of insects on the snow, which covered a large frozen lake 

 some leagues from Stockholm. Preceding and accompany- 

 ing both these falls of insects were violent storms that had 

 torn up trees by the roots, and carried away to a great dis- 

 tance the surrounding earth, and at the same time the insects 

 which had taken up their winter quarters in it.'^ These in- 

 sects were chiefly Brachyptera h., Aphodii, Spiders, cater- 

 pillars, and particularly the larvse of the Telephorus fus- 

 cus:^ Another shower of insects is recorded to have fallen 



1 Hone's Ev. Bay Bk., i. 294. 



2 Gent. Mag., iii.' 492. 3 /j/j.^ jxiv. 293. 

 * K. and S. Introd., ii. 415. 



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