562 History of Luminescence 



luminous mole-cricket caught by a farmer in 1780 and brought to a 

 Dr. Sutton at Iskelton, Cambridgeshire, England. The find was de- 

 scribed in Kirby and Spence's Introduction to Entomology, pub- 

 lished in 1817. Another luminous mole-cricket, found by a pupil 

 of F. Ludwig of Greiz, in 1891, established very definitely that this 

 mole-cricket was infected with luminous bacteria. 



Another early record of light from insects concerns luminous 

 midges, observed at Astrabad, Persia by Carl Hablitzl (1789) . He 

 wrote a letter to Peter Pallas (1741-1811) in July 7, 1782, in which 

 he said: 



Besides this luminous insect (Lampyris) , which is of very frequent 

 occurrence on the shores of the Bay of Astrabad, I have likewise had the 

 occasion to observe that in the dark a light also emanates from the gnats 

 (Culex pipiens, L.) . In fact I noticed this last autumn and in the 

 spring of the present year, since these insects had established themselves 

 in multitudes on board our ships. 



It has now been established that midges from middle Europe and 

 Asia, like the ones observed by Hablitzl, frequently become infected 

 with luminous bacteria and, after lighting for some time, die of the 

 infection. 



The larvae of other flies, fungus gnats of the genus, Ceroplatus, 

 which live on webs under mushrooms are self-luminous. They were 

 first discovered by Peter Frederik Wahlberg (1800-1877) in Sweden 

 in 1849. A closely allied form is the famous New Zealand glow- 

 worm, Arachnocampa or Boletophila, whose larvae live in great 

 numbers in caves and dark places in New Zealand and Australia. 

 The first descriptions were by E. Meyrick in 1886 and by G. V. 

 Hudson in 1886 and later years. 



Luminous caterpillars, whose light is now known to come from 

 luminous bacteria were described as early as 1829 by B. A. Gimmer- 

 thal of Riga and by Jean Alphonse Boisduval (1799-1879) in 1832, 

 while luminous bacterial infections of the antennae of a noctuid 

 moth was observed in 1899 by Oskar Schultz. 



Luminous May flies, presumably bacterial infections, were ob- 

 served by Hermann August Hagen (1817-1893) in 1873 and A. E. 

 Eaton in 1880, while luminous ants have been reported by F. 

 Ludwig in 1902 and W. M. Wheeler in 1916. 



In the meantime, observation of light production in the simplest 

 wingless insects, the Collembola, was noted by G. J. Allman on a 

 hill near Dublin in Ireland in 1851. The animals are self-luminous 

 and have been studied by Dubois (1886) and by numerous workers 

 since then. 



