418 The Animal-Lore of Shahspeare* s Time. 
have been a somewhat expensive cure; it is, moreover, a 
great indignity that the king of beasts should be boiled 
down to make an ointment for the stings of flies. 
It is evident by the illustration he gives, that by the 
hair-tail or bristle-tail Muffett means the Ichneumon fly. 
Though he would probably have been puzzled to give 
a complete life history of this insect, this author is quite 
correct in stating that it feeds on smaller flies and cater¬ 
pillars. A curious instance of how easily an insufficient 
observation of natural phenomena may lead to a conclu¬ 
sion exactly opposed to the true state of things, occurs in 
Leigh’s Natural History of Lancashire (p. 149). The 
writer here imagines the small ichneumon grubs to be 
the young of the caterpillar. He says :— 
“ The caterpillar deposites her eggs in cotton, in the clefts of trees, 
which are enliven’d by the influence of the sun, at a proper season of 
the year; I do think she is destroy’d by her young ones, which creep 
within her to suck, for I have sometimes found them creeping upon 
•cabbages, with twenty young ones within them, and sometimes dead 
with these within their bodies; they enter them at little orifices like 
nipples, on either side of the belly, and sometimes creep so far as to be 
scarce discernible, but most commonly one half of them hangs out. 
The possum in the West Indies is said after the same manner to 
convey and nourish its young ones, ... so various are the methods 
which different creatures have for the preservation of their species.” 
After this remarkable conclusion the author sagely 
{observes:— 
“ Thus we croud our heads with unnecessary and false ideas of 
things, and neglect the most useful part of learning, which is a true 
knowledge of the properties of bodies, so far as we can attain to it by 
. experimental learning.” (Page 169.) 
Those who have reared butterflies and moths know to 
their cost that caterpillars are frequently destroyed by 
ichneumon grubs; but these objectionable parasites must 
in, common justice be acquitted of “ a wrong something 
unfilial.” 
