112 



MORE MINOR HORRORS 



the nervous, and this species is known as the 

 * greater death-watch.' 



But to return to the biscuit-' weevil.' 

 The mature insect is about a quarter of an inch 

 long, and lives at large ; it is the larva which 

 burrows into and attacks the 

 dried biscuit — the * hard-tack ' 

 of the Navy. Less of a wood- 

 borer than its allies, it neverthe- 

 less attacks almost any vegetable 

 substance; and Butler tells us 

 that ' rhubarb-root, ginger, 

 wafers, and even so unlikely a 

 substance as Cayenne pepper 

 have been greedily devoured 

 by it.' Several generations 

 have been known to flourish 

 on a diet of opium, and it has 

 been found in tablets of com- 

 pressed meat. Vegetable matter, even in an 

 altered state — such as paper — affords it an 

 ample meal; and in one case the larva of 

 an Anobium paniceum bored steadily in a 

 straight line through twenty-seven folio 

 volumes in a public library, and so straight 

 was the tunnel that a string could be 

 passed through it from end to end. In one 

 of our libraries at Cambridge some Arabic 

 manuscripts were almost entirely destroyed 

 by the larvae, which do not hesitate to browse 



Fig. 30.— Bis- 

 cuit-' weevil,' Ano- 

 bium paniceum. 

 (EVom David Sharp, 

 The Cambridge Na- 

 tural History, vol. 

 vi.) 



