When he fell a scorched and blighted thing.—
Still ever the Moths in hope to win,
Unheeding the lesson, the gay Firefly,
Dash, reckless, the dazzling torch within,
And, vainly striving, fall and die!
Washington, D. C., June 24, 1864.
Moufet says: “Our North, as well as our West countrymen, call it (the Moth, Phalaina) Saule, i.e. Psychen, Animam, the soul; because some silly people in old time did fancy that the souls of the dead did fly about in the night seeking light.”[838] “Pliny commends a goat’s liver to drive them away, yet he shews not the means to use it.”[839]
One of the most highly prized curiosities in the collection of Horace Walpole, was the silver bell with which the popes used to curse the caterpillars. This bell was the work of Benvenuto Cellini, one of the most extraordinary men of his extraordinary age, and the relievos on it representing caterpillars, butterflies, and other insects, are said to have been wonderfully executed.[840]
In Purchas’s Pilgrims, we read of worms being sprinkled with holy water to kill them.[841]
Apuleius says, that if you take the caterpillars from another garden, and boil them in water with anethum, and let them cool, and besprinkle the herbs, you will destroy the existing caterpillars.[842]