Curious Facts in the History of Insects; Including Spiders and Scorpions. / A Complete Collection of the Legends, Superstitions, Beliefs, and Ominous Signs Connected with Insects; Together with Their Uses in Medicine, Art, and as Food; and a Summary of Their Remarkable Injuries and Appearances.

by Frank Cowan

Ptinidæ—Death-watch, etc.

The common name of Death-watch, given to the Anobium tesselatum, sufficiently announces the popular prejudice against this insect; and so great is this prejudice, that, as says an editor of Cuvier’s works, the fate of many a nervous and superstitious patient has been accelerated by listening, in the silence and solitude of night, to this imagined knell of his approaching dissolution.[182] The learned Sir Thomas Browne considered the superstition connected with the Death-watch of great importance, and remarks that “the man who could eradicate this error from the minds of the people would save from many a cold sweat the meticulous heads of nurses and grandmothers,”[183] for such persons are firm in the belief, that

The solemn Death-watch clicks the hour of death.

The witty Dean of St. Patrick endeavored to perform this useful task by means of ridicule. And his description, suggested, it would appear, by the old song of “A cobbler there was, and he lived in a stall,” runs thus:

——A wood worm

That lies in old wood, like a hare in her form,

With teeth or with claws, it will bite, it will scratch;

And chambermaids christen this worm a Death-watch;

Because, like a watch, it always cries click.

Then woe be to those in the house that are sick!

For, sure as a gun, they will give up the ghost,

If the maggot cries click when it scratches the post.

But a kettle of scalding hot water injected,

Infallibly cures the timber affected:

The omen is broken, the danger is over,

The maggot will die, and the sick will recover.

Grose, in his Antiquities, thus expresses this superstition: “The clicking of a Death-watch is an omen of the death of some one in the house wherein it is heard.” Watts says: “We learn to presage approaching death in a family by ravens and little worms, which we therefore call a Death-watch.”[184] Gay, in one of his Pastorals, thus alludes to it:

When Blonzelind expired,.…

The solemn Death-watch click’d the hour she died.[185]

And Train,—

An’ when she heard the Dead-watch tick,

She raving wild did say,

“I am thy murderer, my child;

I see thee, come away.”

And Pope,—

Misers are muck-worms, silkworms beaux,

And Death watches physicians.[186]

“It will take,” says Mrs. Taylor, a writer in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, “a force unknown at the present time to physiological science to eradicate the feeling of terror and apprehension felt by almost every one on hearing this small insect.” She herself, an entomologist, confesses to have been very much annoyed at times by coming in contact with this “strange nuisance;” but she was cured by an overapplication. “I went to pay a visit,” says she, “to a friend in the country. The first night I fancied I should have gone mad before morning. The walls of the bed-room were papered, and from them beat, as it were, a thousand watches—tick, tick, tick! Turn which way I would, cover my head under the bedclothes to suffocation, every pulse in my body had an answering tick, tick, tick! But at last the welcome morning dawned, and early I was down in the library; even here every book, on shelf above shelf, was riotous with tick, tick, tick! At the breakfast table, beneath the plates, cups, and dishes, beat the hateful sound. In the parlor, the withdrawing-room, the kitchen, nothing

but tick, tick! The house was a huge clock, with thousands of pendulums ticking from morning till night. I was careful not to allow my great discomfort to annoy others. I argued what they could tolerate, surely I could; and in a few days habit had rendered the fearful, dreaded ticking a positive necessity.”[187]

The Death-watch commences its clicking, which is nothing more than the call or signal by which the male and female are led to each other, chiefly when spring is far advanced. The sound is thus produced: Raising itself upon its hind legs, with the body somewhat inclined, it beats its head with great force and agility upon the plane of position. The prevailing number of distinct strokes which it beats in succession is from seven to nine or eleven; which circumstance, thinks Mr. Shaw, may perhaps still add, in some degree, to the ominous character which it bears. These strokes follow each other quickly, and are repeated at uncertain intervals. In old houses, where these insects abound, they may be heard in warm weather during the whole day.[188]

Baxter, in his World of Spirits, p. 203, most sensibly observes, that “there are many things that ignorance causeth multitudes to take for prodigies. I have had many discreet friends that have been affrighted with the noise called a Death-watch, whereas I have since, near three years ago, oft found by trial that it is a noise made upon paper by a little, nimble, running worm, just like a louse, but whiter and quicker; and it is most usually behind a paper pasted to a wall, especially to wainscot; and it is rarely, if ever, heard but in the heat of summer.” Our author, however, relapses immediately into his honest credulity, adding: “But he who can deny it to be a prodigy, which is recorded by Melchior Adamus, of a great and good man, who had a clock-watch that had layen in a chest many years unused; and when he lay dying, at eleven o’clock, of itself, in that chest, it struck eleven in the hearing of many.”

In the British Apollo, 1710, ii. No. 86, is the following query: “Why Death-watches, crickets, and weasels do come more common against death than at any other time? A. We look upon all such things as idle superstitions, for were

any thing in them, bakers, brewers, inhabitants of old houses, &c., were in a melancholy condition.”

To an inquiry, ibid. vol. ii. No. 70, concerning a Death-watch, whether you suppose it to be a living creature, answer is given: “It is nothing but a little worm in the wood.”

“How many people have I seen in the most terrible palpitations, for months together, expecting every hour the approach of some calamity, only by a little worm, which breeds in old wainscot, and, endeavoring to eat its way out, makes a noise like the movement of a watch!” Secret Memoirs of the late Mr. Duncan Campbell, 8vo. Lond. 1732, p. 61.[189]

Authors were formerly not agreed concerning the insect from which this sound of terror proceeded, some attributing it to a kind of wood-louse, others to a spider.

M. Peiguot mentions an instance where, in a public library that was but little frequented, twenty-seven folio volumes were perforated in a straight line by one and the same larva of a small insect (Anobium pertinax or A. striatum?) in such a manner that, on passing a cord through the perfectly round hole made by the insect, these twenty-seven volumes could be raised at once.[190]