LUMINOUS INSECTS. 



Their beauties visible : one while they stream 'd 

 A bright blue radiance upon flowers that closed 

 Their gorgeous colours from the eye of day ; 

 Now motionless and dark, eluded search, 

 Self-shrouded ; and anon, starring the sky, 

 Rose like a shower of fire." 



The beautiful poetical imagery with which Mr. Sou- 

 they has decorated this and a few other entomological 

 facts, will make you join in my regret that a more ex- 

 tensive acquaintance with the science has not enabled 

 him to spread his embellishments over a greater number. 

 The gratification which the entomologist derives from 

 seeing his favourite study adorned with the graces of 

 poetry is seldom unalloyed with pain, arising from the 

 inaccurate knowledge of the subject in the poet. Dr. 

 Darwin's description of the beetle to which the nut- 

 maggot is transformed may delight him (at least if he 

 be an admirer of the Darwinian style) as he reads for 

 the first time, 



" So sleeps in silence the Curculio, shut 

 In the dark chamber of the cavern'd nut ; 

 Erodes with ivory beak the vaulted shell, 

 And quits on filmy wings its narrow cell." 



But when the music of the lines has allowed him room 

 for pause, and he recollects that they are built wholly 

 upon an incorrect supposition, the Curculio never inha- 

 biting the nut in its beetle shape, nor employing its ivory 

 or rather ebony beak upon it, but undergoing its trans- 

 formation under ground, he feels disappointed that the 

 passage has not truth as well as sound. Mr. Southey, 

 too, has fallen into an error : he confounds the fire- 

 fly of St. Domingo (Elater noctilucus) with a quite dif- 

 ferent insect, the lantern-fly (Fulgora laternaria] of 



