LUMINOUS INSECTS. 507 



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 inhabiting the nut in its beetle shape, nor employing its 

 ivory or rather ebony beak upon it, but undergoing its transformation 

 underground, 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 different insect, the 

 lantern-fly (Fulgora laternaria) of Madame Merian ; but happily this error 

 does not affect his poetry. 



But to return from this digression. If we are to believe Mouffet (and 

 the story is not incredible), the appearance of the tropical fire-flies on one 

 occasion led to a more important result than might have been expected 

 from such a cause. He tells us, that when Sir Thomas Cavendish and Sir 

 Robert Dudley first landed in the West Indies, and saw in the evening an 

 infinite number of moving lights in the woods, which were merely these 

 insects, they supposed that the Spaniards were advancing upon them, 

 and immediately betook themselves to their ships 1 : a result as well 

 entitling the Elaters to a commemoration feast as a similar good office 

 the land- crabs of Hispaniola, which, as the Spaniards tell (and the 

 story is confirmed by an anniversary Fiesta de los Cangrejos), by their clat- 

 tering mistaken by the enemy for the sound of Spanish cavalry close 

 upon their heels in like manner scared away a body of English invaders 

 of the city of St. Domingo. 2 



An anecdote less improbable, perhaps, and certainly more ludicrous, is 

 related by Sir J. E. Smith of the effect of the first sight of the Italian 

 glow-worms upon some Moorish ladies ignorant of such appearances. 

 These females had been taken prisoners at sea, and, until they could be 

 ransomed, lived in a house in the outskirts of Genoa, where they were 

 frequently visited by the respectable inhabitants of the city; a party of 

 whom, on going one evening, were surprised to find the house closely shut 

 up, and their Moorish friends in the greatest grief and consternation. On 

 inquiring into the cause, they ascertained that some of the Pygolampis 

 Italica had found their way into the dwelling, and that the ladies within 

 had taken it into their heads that these brilliant guests were no other than 

 the troubled spirits of their relations ; of which idea it was some time 

 before they could be divested. The common people in Italy have a su- 

 perstition respecting these insects somewhat similar, believing that they are 

 of a spiritual nature, and proceed out of the graves, and hence carefully 

 avoid them. 3 



In addition to the Lampyndce and Elateridce, it seems probable that other 

 coleopterous families include luminous species. Chiroscelis bifenestrata of 



1 112. 2 Walton's Hispaniola, i. 39. 



5 Tour on the Continent, 2d Edit, iii. 85. 



