OF FULGORA CANDEL^RIA. 49 



not nocturnal insects ; and this being the case, what would be 

 the use of their lights ? I shall now proceed to prove, by most 

 unexceptionable witnesses, that the English glow-worm, 

 Lampyris, and cognate genera, are the fire-flies of the old 

 continent; and that these, together with Elater, and cognate 

 genera, are the fire-flies of the new ; leaving the Fulgora to 

 be the fire-fly of poets and painters only. It is unknown 

 except in fiction, therefore let fiction alone retain it. 

 " Pictoribiis atque poetis 



Quidlibet audendi semper fuit a;qua potestas 



Scimus." 



Does it not become us then to discard a fictitious emblem 

 from a work whose false steps are recorded with anxious 

 accuracy ? Beginning with the Old World, our little 

 island, cold though it be, has its fire-fly. The glow-worm 

 is the only representative which we boast of this night-cheer- 

 ing insect, and the luminosity appears to be, in our species, 

 almost confined to one sex, the lady lighting up the 

 beacon of love ; the male, however, is not without its tiny 

 lamps, two minute phosphorescent spots appearing on the 

 under side of the paratefum. I have a specimen now living, 

 which has been reared from the e^g, by my friend Rogerson, 

 of the Greenwich Observatory. It is seldom, in this country, 

 that we have the satisfaction of seeing this insect on the wing, 

 but instances have occurred. At Llanhowel, in South Wales, 

 a resident observer has several times had transitory glimpses 

 of these wandering lights, which might have passed for ignes 

 fatid, but that they flew to his reading lamp, and proved 

 themselves corporeal. France, Spain, Italy, and Turkey, have 

 their hiccioU in abundance. A friend of mine, resident for 

 some years near the Bay of Naples, describes their appearance 

 as superlatively beautiful on a summer's eve. He observed, 

 that when the air was heavy with the hrnmn del mare, they 

 ceased to fly, and settled on the olives and other shrubs, from 

 which he delighted in shaking them, and causing a shower of 

 fire, like the golden rain of an exploded rocket. The oriental 

 Forbes noticed them at Rome. " I have seen them," says he, 

 " produce a fine effect in the dark recesses of the majestic Col- 

 liseum, and illumine the garden of the Villa Medici. On the 

 banks of the Arno they add much to the beauty of a Tuscan 

 evening." The same author remarked them again in India, 



NO. I. vol.. HI. H 



