

67 



Nat. Hist. No. 10) ; the caterpillar more especially feeding upon that plant. It 

 requires however to be carefully sought after, as it generally feeds by night, and the 

 moth itself is but rarely seen at large. Sometimes, however, the caterpillars are so 

 numerous as to attract public attention ; when the public journals teem with the 

 most ridiculous accounts of the " strange monsters, now for the first time discovered 

 in the country." Other circumstances likewise tend to cause the Death's-head- 

 moth to be regarded as an object of alarm by the vulgar : the skull-like patch on 

 the back of the thorax, the large size of the insect, and the singular squeaking noise 

 which it emits when alarmed, and which has been compared to the creaking of a 

 cork ; hence Latreille informs us, that " il parut une annee en Bretagne, en assez 

 grand nombre et comme a cette epoque il y r£gnoit une maladie epidemique qui 

 faisoit perir beaucoup de malades, ou lui attribue cette mortalite." ( Hist. Gen. des Ins. 

 vol. 14, p. 128.) 



" Superstition has been particularly active," observes the author of a Journal 

 of a Naturalist, " in suggesting causes of alarm from the insect world; and where 

 man should have seen only beauty and wisdom, he has often found terror and 

 dismay : 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 Europe, 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 1834 that my informer collected fifty of them in the potatoe- 

 fields of his village, where they called them the Death's-head-phantom, the Wan- 

 dering Death-bird, &c. The markings on its back represent to their fertile imagi- 

 nations the head of a perfect skeleton, with the limb-bones crossed beneath ; its cry 

 becomes the voice of anguish, the moaning of a child, the signal of grief. It is 

 regarded not as the creation of a benevolent being, but the device of evil spirits — 

 spirits enemies to man — conceived and fabricated in the dark, and the very shining 

 of its eyes is thought to represent the fiery element whence it is supposed to have 

 proceeded. Flying into their apartments in the evening it at times extinguishes the 

 light ; foretelling war, pestilence, hunger, death to man and beast. We pity rather 

 than ridicule their fears, their consequences being painful anxiety of mind and 

 suffering of body." 



This noise has been the subject of much investigation, which must still be 

 considered as unsettled. By Reaumur and Rbsel it was supposed to be caused by 

 the friction of the labial palpi against each other ; and by Passerini that it was 

 produced within the head, in which is a cavity connected with the spiral tongue. 

 M. de Johet attributes it to the action of the air being suddenly impelled against 

 the scales at the base of the wings by the action of the latter, (as cited by Engramelle). 

 Such is also the opinion of M. Vallot; whilst M. Lorey attributes it to the escape 

 of a current of air through certain cavities at the base of the abdomen, which are 

 furnished with a pencil of hairs. M. Goureau has also described this apparatus as 

 the cause of the sound. It is to be observed, however, that this opinion appears to 

 be negatived by the fact that many mute Lepidoptera possess these cavities and 

 pencils of hairs. 



