242 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



fate awaiting it; Lucian, in his well-known dialogue, The Dream; 

 or, The Cock, as a symbol of the condition to which miserly man 

 may descend. 



Sufficient has been said to show the attitude of the ancients toward 

 these little pests, that had no more regard for their precious thoughts 

 than for the utterances of modern " statesmen," whose speeches are 

 " read by title and ordered printed." 



Crossing the cloistered period of the ages called dark, when books 

 were so few and so constantly used by the jolly monks that these little 

 creatures must have had a difficult time getting a living unobserved, 

 we come down to the sixteenth century, by which time books had 

 begun to multiply and worms to propagate. In the last quarter of 

 this century we find Pierre Petit, who is numbered among the cele- 

 brated pleiade of Latin verse writers along with Rapin, Com mi re, and 

 others, addressing these " impudent creatures " in a thirty-four-line 

 Latin poem titled In Blattam. 



A curious and interesting characterization of some species of book 

 insects has come to us in the writings of Christian Mentzel, the Ger- 

 man naturalist and philologist, who lived in the seventeenth century. 

 When one reads that he heard the bookworm crow like a cock, and 

 said, " I knew not whether some local fowl was clamoring or whether 

 there was but a beating in my ears," one can not help wondering if 

 there was not something defective in his ear drums; but further on he 

 says, " I perceived, in the paper whereon I was writing, a little insect 

 that ceased not to carol like very chanticleer, until taking a mag- 

 nifying glass I assiduously observed him." From this one concludes 

 that if the fault were not with his hearing, by which some well-known 

 sounds made by book insects seemed to him like the crowing of a 

 cock, an altogether different cock from the kind we know must have 

 lived in his day. 



The earliest observations on the subject possessing any scientific 

 value were made by Robert Hooke in his Micrographia, published in 

 London in 1665. In many respects this work was a curious medley 

 of facts and fancy. The registers of the Royal Society, of which he 

 was a member, testify to the eagerness with which Hooke hurried 

 from one inquiry to another with " brilliant but inconclusive re- 

 sults." Among the many objects which engaged his attention was 

 an insect which he described in a chapter entitled Of the Small Silver- 

 colour'd Bookworm. His description shows it to have been the " fish- 

 tail," by naturalists called Lepisma, well known as one of the pests 

 that not infrequently is found in the library as well as other parts of 

 the house. 



Many interesting instances of the discovery of bookworms are 

 found in the literature on the subject, showing the keen interest felt 



