45 1 
i 882.] Will- o' -the -Wisp : a Confession, 
The movement of the light is totally unlike that of a man 
carrying a lantern. It is at times much swifter, overleaps 
objects which a man could not surmount, and plays often 
over water and at heights of from 20 to 50 feet in the air. 
Neither can we consider that it is produced by the reflection 
of a light thrown from some neighbouring house. Fire- 
works are equally out of the question. Not to speak of the 
slowly progressive movements of the Wisp sometimes ol> 
served, it is in the highest degree improbable that any 
trickster would convey a quantity of pyrotechnical appliances 
into solitary moorlands, woods, and peat-bogs, in order to 
alarm some stray traveller. 
Another hypothesis, advanced by certain very learned 
authors, such as Ray, Willoughby, Kirby, and Spence, — 
ascribes the Wisp to luminous insedts. Dr. Dereham and 
Dr. Phipson combat this view on the ground that such 
inseCts “ rise far higher in the air than does the Wisp, and 
present the appearance of hundreds of little specks of light.” 
This argument seems scarcely valid ; luminous inseCts are 
in all probability more numerous than is ordinarily supposed, 
and vary considerably in their habits. Not all are high 
flyers, nor are they all gregarious. The apparent size of the 
light may be considered a fatal obstacle, since no known 
English inseCt emits a light of the size of “ two fists.” But 
a light seen in a dark night by a superstitious and terrified 
ploughboy will very naturally be described — and that without 
any conscious or intentional exaggeration — as much larger 
than it really was. The circumstances that the Wisp is 
chiefly seen in calm weather and during the summer season 
are in favour of this supposition. But we have some posi- 
tive testimony to advance. The Rev. Dr. Sutton, of Norwich, 
informed Dr. Kirby that when he was curate of Ickleton, in 
Cambridgeshire, in 1780, a farmer of that place, of the name 
of Simpringham, brought him a mole-cricket ( Gryllotalpa 
vulgaris ), and told him that one of his people, seeing a Jack- 
o' -Lantern, struck at it and knocked it down, when it proved 
to be the insedt in question. Mr. Main (“ Mag. of Natural 
History,” n. s., i., p. 549) was told by a farmer that he had 
encountered and knocked down the luminous objedt, which 
he described as being exadtly like a “ maggy longlegs ” 
( Tipula oleracea), an insedt, we must add, especially abundant 
in boggy and marshy lands. Dr. Dereham, the opponent of 
the insedt theory (“ Phil. Trans.,” 1729, p. 204), describes 
an Ignis fatuus which he had personally witnessed as flitting 
about a thistle — a very likely adtion for an insedt, though 
very unlikely for a volume of inflammable gas or for an evil 
