18 OBJECTIONS ANSWERED. 



harvest, but a late one if they abound between the hind feet. 1 The 

 appearance of the death's head hawk-moth (Ackerontia Atropos) has in 

 some countries produced the most violent alarm and trepidation amongst 

 the people, who, because it emits a plaintive sound, and is marked with 

 what looks like a death's head upon its back, regarded it as the messenger 

 of pestilence and death. 2 We learn from Linne that a similar super- 

 stition, built upon the black hue and strange aspect of that beetle, prevails 

 in Sweden with respect to Blaps mortisaga 3 ; and in Barbadoes, according 

 to Hughes, the ignorant deem the appearance of a certain grasshopper in 

 their houses as a sure presage of illness to some of the family. 4 



One would not think that the excrements of insects could be objects of 

 terror ; yet so it has been. Many species of Lepidoptera, when they 

 emerge from the pupa state, discharge from their anus a reddish fluid, 

 which, in some instances, where their numbers have been considerable, has 

 produced the appearance of a shower of blood ; and by this natural fact, 

 all those bloody showers, recorded by historians as preternatural, and 

 regarded where they happened as fearful prognostics of impending evils, 

 are stripped of their terrors, and reduced to the class of events that happen 

 in the common course of nature. That insects are the cause of these 

 showers is no recent discovery ; for Sleidan relates that in the year 1553 

 a vast multitude of butterflies swarmed through a great part of Germany, 

 and sprinkled plants, leaves, buildings, clothes, and men, with bloody 

 drops, as if it had rained blood. 5 But the most interesting account of an 

 event of this kind is given by Reaumur, from whom we learn that in the 

 beginning of July, 1608, the suburbs of Aix, and a considerable extent of 

 country round it, were covered with what appeared to be a shower of 

 blood. We may conceive the amazement and stupor of the populace upon 

 such a discovery, the alarm of the citizens, the grave reasonings of the 

 learned. All agreed however in attributing this appearance to the powers 

 of darkness, and in regarding it as the prognostic and precursor of some 

 direful misfortune about to befall them. Fear and prejudice would have 

 taken deep root upon this occasion, and might have produced fatal effects 

 upon some weak minds, had not M. Peirese, a celebrated philosopher of 

 that place, paid attention to insects. A chrysalis which he preserved in 

 his cabinet let him into the secret of this mysterious shower. Hearing a 

 fluttering, which informed him his insect was arrived at its perfect state, 

 he opened the box in which he kept it. The animal flew out and left 

 behind it a red spot. He compared this with the spots of the bloody 

 shower, and found they were alike. At the same time he observed there 

 was a prodigious quantity of butterflies flying about, and that the drops 

 of the miraculous rain were not to be found upon the tiles, nor even upon 

 the upper surface of the stones, but chiefly in cavities and places where 

 rain could not easily come. Thus did this judicious observer dispel the 

 ignorant fears and terror which a natural phenomenon had caused. 6 



The same author relates an instance of the gardener of a gentleman 

 being thrown into a horrible fright by digging up some of the curious cases 



1 Detharding de Insectis Coleopteris Danicis, 9. 



2 Reaum. ii. 289. This insect and its caterpillar is finely figured in Mr. Curtis's 

 elegant and scientific British Entomology, 1. 147. 



3 Faun. Suec. 822. * Nat. Hist, of Barbad. 85. 

 * Quoted in Mouffet, 107. 6 Reaum. i. 667. 



