180 DIRECT BENEFITS DERIVED FROM INSECTS. 
Pliny. Another species of Mylabris has been described by Major- 
General Hardwicke in the Asiatic Transactions *, plentiful in all parts of 
Bengal, Bahar, and Oude, which is fully as efficacious as the common 
Spanish fly; and in other parts of India Cantharis gigas and violacea are 
employed, as is C. ruficeps in Sumatra and Java; C. atomaria in Brazil ; 
C. Syriaca in Arabia ; and in some parts of Europe Lydus (Mylabris Fab.) 
trimaculatus. : 
But it is as supplying products valuable;in the arts and manufactures 
that we are chiefly indebted to insects. In adyerting to them in this view, 
I shall not dwell upon the articles derived from a few species in particular 
districts, and confined to these alone, such as the soap which in some 
parts of Africa is manufactured from a beetle (Chlenius saponarius *) ; the 
oil which, Molina tells us, is obtained in Chili from large globular cellules 
found upon the wild rosemary, and supposed to be produced by a kind of 
gall-fly® ; and the manure for which Scopoli informs us the hosts of Bphe- 
mere that annually emerge in the month of June from the Laz, a river in 
Carniola, are employed by the husbandmen, who think they have had a 
bad harvest unless every one has collected at least twenty loads.® 
Still less is it my intention to detain you in considering the purpose to 
which in the West Indies and South America the fire-flies are put by the 
natives, who employ them as lanterns in their journeys, and lamps in 
their houses?;—or the use as ornaments to which some insects are 
ingeniously applied by the ladies, who in China embroider their dresses 
with the elytra and crust of abrilliant species of beetle (Buprestis vittata); 
in Chili and the Brazils form splendid necklaces of the golden Chrysomelide 
and brilliant diamond beetles, &c.°; in some parts of the Continent string 
together for the same purpose the burnished yiolet-coloured thighs of 
Geotrupes stercorarius, &c.°; and in India, as 1 am informed by Major 
Moor and Captain Green, even have recourse to fire-flies, which they 
inclose in gauze, and use as ornaments for their hair when they take their 
evening walks, I shall confine my details to the more important and 
1 Hist. Nat. 1, xix. c. 4. 3 Vol. v. 213. 
5 Westwood’s Mod. Class. of Ins. i.297. See also Burmeister’s Manual of Ent. 
p.562., who says that the species used by the ancients appears to have been Mylabris 
Fiieslini Panz., which is very abundant in the south of Nurope, and is sometimes found 
jn Germany. The active blistering principle in all these insects has been detected 
by M. Robiquet, and named by him Cantharidine, which has been ascertained by M. 
Bretonneau, and especially by M. Leclere, who has examined a great number of in- 
sects with this view, to be found amongst coleopterous insects of the family of Can- 
tharide only, though not in all the species of this family, nor even in all the species 
of the same genus. M. Leclerc, who conceives that Cantharidine is secreted by a 
peculiar apparatus, states that it is not destroyed either by the action of the air or 
of time; and as it must exist in a spider of the United States (Teqenaria medicinalis 
Hentz.; Journ. Acad. Nat. Sci. of Philadelphia, 1821, p. 63. pl. 5.), which is there 
extensively employed as a vesicatory, he examined if this principle is to be found in 
the Tegenarie of France or in other spiders, but without success. (Leclere, Essai 
sur les Epipastiques, Paris, 1835, quoted in Guérin, Bulletin Zoologique, i. 95.) 
4 Carabus Oliv., Entom. iii. 69. t. iii. f. 26. Compare Philanthropist, ii. 210. 
5 Molina’s Chili, i. 174, 6 Ent. Carniol. 264. 
7 Captain Green was accustomed to put a fire-fly under the glass of his watch, when 
he had occasion to rise very early for a march, which enabled him without difficulty 
to distinguish the hour. 
8 Molina, i.. 11. 286. 9 Latr. Hist, Nat. x. 148 
