TEREDO. 127 



in his history of animals, when he describes the reprjBoov 

 as a grub, which is bred in bee-hives. Possibly he 

 meant a young honey-bee. His T6vdpr)Ba)v (which 

 Casaubon incorrectly rendered teredo) is another kind 

 of bee. However, his friend Theophrastus, who suc- 

 ceeded him in the Lyceum at Athens, mentioned the 

 reprjScbv in such precise terms as to leave no doubt of 

 its being the mollusk in question. In the history of 

 plants, written by this great naturalist and philosopher 

 about 350 b.c, he restricted the name to a marine 

 destroyer of wood, distinguishing the terrestrial kinds 

 as o-K(o\7]K€<i and Oplire^, which may be designated 

 worms and grubs. His observations were made in his 

 native island of Lesbos ; and he says that the reprjBoDV 

 lives in the sea only, and is of small size but has a 

 large head and teeth. This description was probably 

 taken from Teredo minima. He remarked that wood 

 attacked by grubs might be easily restored and made 

 useful, by dipping it into the sea ; but there was no re- 

 medy for wood infested by the Tey^edo. In the same 

 restricted sense the word " teredo ^' was mentioned by 

 Ovid; and in his first epistle from Pontus occur the 

 well-known lines which were quoted by Sellius, and 

 were considered by Forbes and Hanley applicable to his 

 own sad case. The kind alluded to by Ovid was in all 

 probability the T. navalis of Linne, because after the 

 Crimean war I received specimens of this species, 

 which had been extracted from one of the Russian ves- 

 sels sunk at the entrance of Sebastopol. Pliny gave no 

 information of his own on the subject ; and even the 

 meagre account which he gleaned from Theophrastus 

 and others was very confused. Natural history was 

 at a considerable discount during the '^^dark ages ;^' 

 and the Teredo does not appear to have attracted the 



