542 



LUMINOUS INSECTS. 



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 

 under "-round, 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 (FuJgora laternaria) of INIadame 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 expect- 

 ed 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 

 evenino- 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^ : 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 Cangrcjos), by their 

 clattering — 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.^ 



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 Pygo- 

 lampis 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 superstition respecting these insects somewhat similar, believing 

 that they are of a spiritual nature, and proceed out of the graves, and 

 hence carefully avoid them.^ 



In addition to the LampyricJa' and Elaterida, it seems probable that 

 other coleopterous families include luminous species. Chiroscelis bifenes- 

 trata of Lamarck, a beetle, has two red oval spots covered with a downy 

 membrane on the second segment of the abdomen, which he thinks indi- 

 cate some particular organ, perhaps luminous"*; and M. Latreille informed 

 me that a friend of his, who saw one living which was brought from 

 China to the Isle of France in wood, found that the oceJli in the elytra of 

 Tiuprcstis occllata were luminous. One of the longicorn beetles, JDadoy- 

 chus Jlavociiicius Chevrolat (allied to Saperda), has the third and fourth 

 sef^ments of the abdomen with the same yellow color and appearance of the 



» 112. * Walton's Hispaniola, i. 39. 



' Tour on the Continent, 2d Edit. iii. 85. •• Latr. Hist. Nat. x. 262. 



