416 LUMINOUS INSECTS. 
The beautiful poetical imagery with which Mr. Sou- 
they has decorated this and a few other entomological 
facts, will make you join in my regret that a more ex- 
tensive acquaintance with the science has not, enabled 
him to spread his embellishments over a greater number. 
The gratification which the entomologist derives from 
seeing his favourite study adorned with the graces of 
poetry is seldom unalloyed with pain, arising from the 
inaccurate knowledge of the subject in the poet. Dr. 
Darwin’s description of the beetle to which the nut-mag- 
got is transformed may delight him (at least if he be an 
admirer of the Darwinian style) as he reads for the first 
time, 
“So sleeps in silence the Curculio, shut 
In the dark chamber of the cavern’d nut ; 
Erodes with ivory beak the vaulted shell, 
And quits on filmy wings its narrow cell.” 
But when the music of the lines has allowed him room 
for pause, and he recollects that they are built wholly 
upon an incorrect supposition, the Curculio never inha- 
biting the nut in its beetle shape, nor employing its ivory 
or rather ebony beak upon it, but undergoing its trans- 
formation under ground, 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 (later noctilucus) with a quite dif- 
ferent insect, the lantern-fly (Fudgora laternaria) of 
Madam Merian; but happily this error does not affect 
his poetry. 
But to return from this digression.—If we are to be- 
lieve Mouffet, (and the story is not incredible,) the ap- 
pearance of the tropical fire-flies one occasion led to a 
