28 



OBJECTIONS ANSWERED. 



of that beetle, prevails in Sweden with respect to Btaps 

 mortisaga ^ ; and in Barbadoes, according to Hughes, the 

 ignorant deem the appearance of a certain grasshopper in 

 their houses as a sure presage of illness to some of the 

 family. - 



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 considerable, 

 has produced the appearance of a shower of blood ; and 

 by this natural fact, all those bloody showers, recorded 

 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 great part of Grermany, and 

 sprinkled plants, leaves, buildings, clothes, and men, with 

 bloody drops, as if it had rained blood. ^ But the most in- 

 teresting account of an event of this kind is given by 

 Beaumur, from whom we learn that in the beginning of July, 

 1608, the suburbs of Aix, and a considerable extent of 

 country round it, were covered with what appeared to be a 

 shower of blood. We may conceive the amazement and 

 stupor of the populace upon such a discovery, the alarm of 

 the citizens, the grave reasonings of the learned. All agreed 

 however in attributing this appearance to the powers of 

 darkness, and in regarding it as the prognostic and precursor 

 of some direful misfortune about to befall them. Fear and 

 prejudice would have taken deep root upon this occasion, 

 and might have produced fatal eflects upon some weak 

 minds, had not M. Peiresc, a celebrated philosopher of that 

 place, paid attention to insects. A chrysalis which he pre- 

 served in his cabinet let him into the secret of this mys- 

 terious shower. Hearing a fluttering, which informed him 



1 Faun. Suec. 822. 



3 Quoted in Mouffet, 107. 



2 Nat. Hist, of Barhad. 85. 



