DIFFERENT PRODUCTIONS OF DIFFERENT CARCASES.
(Vol. vi., p. 263.)
Up to a very recent period, it was held, even by philosophers, that each of the four elements, as well as every living plant and animal, both
brute and human, generated insects; but of all sources of this equivocal generation, none was considered more potent than the putrefaction or corruption of animal matter: as Du Bartas says:
"God, not contented to each kind to give,
And to infuse the virtue generative,
By His wise power, made many creatures breed,
Of lifeless bodies without Venus' deed."
Sixth Day.
Pliny, after giving Virgil's receipt for making bees, gives similar instances:
"Like as dead horses will breed waspes and hornets; and asses carrion, turne to be beetle-flies by a certaine metamorphosis which Nature maketh from one creature to another."—Lib. xi. c. xx.
And soon after he says of wasps:
"All the sorte of these live upon flesh, contrarie to the manner of bees, which will not touch a dead carcasse."
This brings Shakepeare's lines to mind:
" 'Tis seldom when the bee doth leave her comb
In the dead carrion."
Henry IV., Part II. Act IV. Sc. 4.
The Belfast News Letter of Friday, Aug. 10, 1832, gives one of these rare occurrences:
"A few days ago, when the sexton was digging a grave in Temple Cranney (a burying-place in Portaferry, co. Down), he came to a coffin which had been there two or three years: this he thought necessary to remove. In this operation, he was startled by a great quantity of wild bees issuing forth from the coffin; and upon lifting the lid, it was found that they had formed their combs in the dead man's skull and mouth, which were full. The nest was made of the hair of the head, together with shavings that had been put in the coffin with the corpse."
This quotation is given in an interesting work of Mr. Patterson's, Letters on the Natural History of the Insects mentioned in Shakspeare's Plays: London, 1838.
Your correspondent R. T. shows that serpents were supposed to be generated by human carcases. Pliny says:
"I have heard many a man say that the marrow of a man's backebone will breed to a snake."—Hist. Nat., x. 66.
The story of the "fair young German gentleman" reminds me of one of a gentle shepherd and his beloved Amarante, told in De Britaine's Human Prudence, 12th edit., Dublin, 1726, Part I. p. 171. The corpse of the "Cæsar," seen by St. Augustine and Monica, was most probably that of Maximus, Emperor of the West, slain by the soldiers of Theodosius, A.D. 388.
Sir Thos. Browne—"treating of the conceit that the mandrake grows under gallowses, and arises from the fat, or οὖρον, of the dead malefactor, and hence has the form of a man—says:
"This is so far from being verified of animals in their corruptive mutations into plants, that they maintain not this similitude in their nearer translation into animals. So when the ox corrupteth into bees, or the horse into hornets, they come not forth in the image of their originals. So the corrupt and excrementitious humours in man are animated into lice: and we may observe that hogs, sheep, goats, hawks, hens, and others, have one peculiar and proper kind of vermin."—Works, Bohn's edit., vol. i. p. 197.
The editor furnishes the following note:
"The immortal Harvey, in his De Generations, struck the first blow at the root of the irrational system called equivocal generation, when he laid down his brief but most pungent law, Omnia ex ovo. But the belief transmitted from antiquity, that living beings generated spontaneously from putrescent matter, long maintained its ground, and a certain modification of it is even still advocated by some naturalists of the greatest acuteness. The first few pages of the volume entitled Insect Transformations (in The Library of Entertaining Knowledge) are occupied by a very interesting investigation of this subject."—See also Sir T. Browne's Works, vol. i. p. 378., vol. ii. pp. 523, 524.; and Izaak Walton's Complete Angler, passim.
The equivocal generation of bees is copiously dwelt on in Bochart's Hierozoicon, London, 1663, fol., Part II. p. 502. Instances of their attaching themselves to dead bodies, in spite of their ordinary antipathy, are given at p. 506.
Eirionnach.