34 , OBJECTIONS ANSWERED. 



many of these mites between the fore feet, they believe 

 that there will be an early harvest, but a late one if they 

 abound between the hind feet a . The appearance of the 

 death's head moth [Sphinx Atropos^ L.) has in some 

 countries produced the most violent alarm and trepida- 

 tion amongst the people, who, because it emits a plain- 

 tive sound, and is marked with what looks like a death's 

 head upon its back, regarded it as the messenger of pes- 

 tilence and death b . We learn from Linne that a similar 

 superstition, built upon the black hue and strange aspect 

 of that beetle, prevails in Sweden with respect to Blaps 

 mortisaga, L. c ; and in Barbadoes, according to Hughes, 

 the ignorant deem the appearance of a certain grasshop- 

 per in their houses as a sure presage of illness to some 

 of the family d . 



One would not think that the excrements of insects 

 could be objects of terror, yet so it has been. Many 

 species of Lepidoptera, when they emerge from the pupa 

 state, discharge from their anus a reddish fluid, which, in 

 some instances, where their numbers have been consider- 

 able, has produced the appearance of a shower of blood; 

 and by this natural fact, all those bloody showers, re- 

 corded by historians as preternatural, and regarded where 

 they happened as fearful prognostics of impending evils, 

 are stripped of their terrors, and reduced to the class of 

 events that happen in the common course of nature. 

 That insects are the cause of these showers is no recent 

 discovery; for Sleidan relates that in the year 1553 a 

 vast multitude of butterflies swarmed through a oreat 



a Detharding de Insectk Coleopteris Daniels, 9. 

 b Reaum. ii. 289. <= Faun. Suec. 8&2. 



4 Nat. Hist. ofBarlad. 85. 



