554 History of Luminescence 



PHENGODES AND STARWORMS 



A closely related form of the genus, Phengodes, which lacks the 

 red light, is found in North America and appears to have been 

 first recorded in a note of C. R. von Osten-Sacken in 1862 on un- 

 known larvae which he thought might be lampyrids, telephorids, 

 or elaterids, probably the latter, of the genus Melanactes. C. J. S. 

 Bethune (1863), B. P. Mann (1875), and C. V. Riley (1880) also 

 thought them elaterid larvae but Riley (1887) , after finding the 

 " larvae " in coitus with males of Phengodes laticoUis, correctly 

 established their identity as larviform females of the Phengodini. 

 J. J. Rivers (1886) described the luminous female of Zarhipis riversi 

 from California, and C. F. Atkinson (1887) found that his female, 

 60 mm. long, burrowed in the ground by day and came out at night, 

 attracting small males (15-20 mm. long) with plumose antennae. 



Allied insects, called starworms, but of different genera, with three 

 rows of lights along their body, were caught in South China and 

 Malaya during the latter part of the nineteenth century, by A. H. 

 Swinton (1880), H. Lucas (1887), and C. O. Waterhouse (1889). 

 ■^♦arworms obtained near Singapore belong to the genus Diplocladon. 



The Cucujo or Pyrophorus 



The Spanish historians of the sixteenth centin^y who observed 

 and described the cucujo, presented a fascinating if somewhat exag- 

 gerated picture of this brilliant tropical " firefly," a click beetle of 

 the genus Pyrophorus. The stories of Oviedo and Peter Martyr 



(see Chap. Ill) have formed the basis for statements of the sixteenth- 

 century naturalists, especially Aldrovandi and Muffet, and have been 

 repeated in accounts of many travelers to the Caribbean region since 

 then. Such seventeenth-century writers on natural history as Bacon 



(1620), Jonston (1653), Swan (1635), Nieremberg (1635), Bar- 

 tholin (1647) , and Marcgrave (1648) , all of whom mentioned the 

 cucujo, mostly obtained their knowledge from books rather than 

 personal acquaintance. The first published drawing of Pyrophorus, 

 reproduced in figure 5 in Chapter III, appears to be that in Muffet's 

 Insectoruni Theatrum (1634) , an adaptation of John White's water- 

 color (see Chapter III) . 



The story of the insect was often distorted in telling, for example, 

 the frequently repeated statement that " each Cucuius carries around 

 four lamps," made by J. E. Nieremberg in Historia Naturae (1635) 

 and by John Swan in Speculum Mundi (1635) . Actually there are 

 two lights on the prothorax (not the eyes, as stated by Robert 



