352 SCIENCE FROM AN EASY CHAIR 



of some other part of the room. Years ago I used to be 

 gently lulled to sleep by these "raps" in my rooms at 

 Oxford, accompanied by the sound of spasmodic rushes 

 of mice behind the woodwork. At first I thought the 

 tapping was caused by the falling of drops of water through 

 a leaky roof, but soon ascertained the actual cause. One 

 does not notice these tappings until the dead of night 

 when all else is still, and they are so mysterious and per- 

 sistent that one can understand superstition arising in 

 connection with them, and that the nerves of any one 

 already overwrought, might be so affected by them as to 

 lead to the belief that evil spirits are " rapping," or that a 

 ghostly coffin is being nailed together for a dying man. 

 The little beetle has often been tracked by a naturalist, 

 and discovered in some concealed position nodding its 

 diminutive but hard head with sharp jerks, and producing 

 an almost incredible volume of sound in proportion to its 

 size. If the beetle, when discovered, is kept in captivity 

 in a wooden box, it is easy to set it " tapping " or " rapping " 

 by tapping oneself with a pencil on the table on which 

 the box is placed, when the faithful little death-watch will 

 unfailingly reply. Possibly some of the " raps " recorded 

 by the pioneers of spirit-rapping, when not produced by 

 the toes of designing mediums like the young ladies of 

 Rochester, N.Y., were actually made by death-watch 

 beetles. It is certain that the somewhat eccentric 

 supposition that disembodied spirits endeavour to make 

 signals to living humanity by " rapping " owes its origin 

 (long before the nineteenth-century craze for " spirit- 

 rapping") to the measured tap-tap-tapping of the death- 

 watch beetle, and the consequent superstition at a time 

 when the beetle was not known to be the " tapper." 



Whilst the bigger beetle, Xestobium, is the common 

 death-watch, it has been proved that the little furniture 

 beetle, Anobium, is also a tapper, making regular and 



