LUMINOUS INSECTS. 507 
least if he be an admirer of the Darwinian style) as he reads for the first 
time, 
“So sleeps in silence the Cureulio, 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 inhabiting the nut in its beetle shape, nor employing its 
ivory or rather ebony beak upon it, but undergoing its transformation 
underground, 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 (Zlater noctilucus) with a quite different insect, the 
lantern-fly (ulgora laternaria) of Madame 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 expected 
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 evening 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 shipst:—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 Pesta de los Cangrejos), by their clat- 
tering — 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 Pygolampis 
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 su- 
perstition 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 Lampyride and Elateride, it seems probable that other 
coleopterous families include luminous species. Chiroscelis bifenestrata of 
1112, 2 Walton’s Hispaniola, i. 39. 
5 Tour on the Continent, 2d Edit, iii. 85. 
