228 HOUSE, GARDEN, AND FIELD 



Anobium paniceum, one of the furniture-beetles, is also 

 the weevil which devours ship's biscuit ; it attacks all 

 sorts of vegetable substances, wood, paper and drugs of 

 various kinds. There is another furniture-beetle which 

 now and then commits great ravages, especially in our 

 southern counties ; this is the Ptilinus pectinicornis. 

 It is of the size of Anobium domes ticum, and distinguished 

 from it by the antennae, which are long and plumose in 

 the male, shorter and simpler in the female. 



The grub of Anobium domesticum is not only a devourer 

 of wood ; it eats paper as well, and is one of the so-called 

 " bookworms." Its burrows may extend from one 

 neglected book to others on the same shelf, and Peignot 

 has recorded an instance in which twenty-seven folio 

 volumes placed side by side on the shelf were drilled by 

 one larva, so that a string might be run through the 

 hole and all the volumes raised by the string. It is 

 rare to find so straight a gallery as this, but we may 

 often find tortuous galleries several inches long. It is 

 chiefly old books which are injured in this way. The 

 general use of chlorine-bleached paper, though a cause 

 of decay in other ways, and the substitution of cheaper 

 materials for linen -rags, have probably checked the ravages 

 of bookworms. 



Several sorts of insects and a few animals of other 

 classes deface or destroy books. Furniture-beetles bore 

 into the covers, besides running their galleries through 

 the piles of unreadable pages. Cockroaches nibble the 

 binding, and now and then the edges of the leaves. Silver 

 fishes gnaw the binding, and leave characteristic sinuous 

 tracks. When the paper has been printed, they leave 

 untouched the inked parts, so that a printed page becomes 

 a tattered skeleton. A small mite (Cheyletus eruditus) 

 has sometimes been found in numbers among books which 

 have been stowed away in damp places, but it is really 

 of carnivorous tastes, and feeds, not on the paper, but on 

 small creatures which lurk in the books. A Chelifer, 



