THE DEATH'S-HEAD MOTH. 327 



itself, or inclination for it. As certain soils will 

 produce plants by exposure to the sun's rays, or by 

 aid of peculiar manures, when no pre-existent root 

 or germ could rationally be supposed to exist ; so 

 will peculiar and long intervening seasons give birth 

 to insects from causes not to be divined. We may 

 perhaps conclude, that some concurrence produced 

 this sphinx, and then its favourite food, the potato 

 plant, nourished it, to the augmentation of its 

 species. 



Superstition has been particularly active in sug- 

 gesting causes of alarm from the insect world ; and 

 where man should have seen only beauty and wis- 

 dom, he has often found terror and dismay. The 

 yellow and brown tailed moths, the deathwatch, 

 our snails, as mentioned in p. 339, and many others, 

 have all been the subjects of his fears; but the 

 dread excited in England by the appearance, noises, 

 or increase of insects, are petty apprehensions, 

 when compared with the horror that the presence 

 of this acherontia occasions to some of the more 

 fanciful and superstitious natives of northern Eu- 

 rope, maintainers of the wildest conceptions. A 

 letter is now before me from a correspondent in 

 German Poland, where this insect is a common 

 creature, and so abounded in 1824, that my informer 

 collected fifty of them in the potato fields of his 

 village, where they call them the <4 death's-head 

 phantom," the " wandering death-bird," &c. The 



