MISCELLANEOUS.
It may be new to many of our readers, who are familiar with the Elegy in a Country Church-yard, to be told that its author was at the pains to turn the characteristics of the Linnæan orders of insects into Latin hexameters, the manuscript of which is still preserved in his interleaved copy of the “Systema Naturæ.”[1240]
It is related by Boerhaave, in his Life of Swammerdam, that when the Grand Duke of Tuscany was visiting with Mr. Thevenot the curiosities of Holland, in 1668, he found nothing more worthy of his admiration than the great naturalist’s account of the structure of caterpillars,—for Swammerdam, by the skillful management of instruments of wonderful delicacy and fineness, showed the duke in what manner the future butterfly, with all its parts, lies neatly folded up in the caterpillar, like a rose in the unexpanded bud. He was, indeed, so struck with this and other wonders of the insect world, disclosed to him by the great naturalist, that he made him the offer of twelve thousand florins to induce him to reside at his court; but Swammerdam, from feelings of independence, modestly declined to accept it, preferring to continue his delightful studies at home.[1241]
There is an epitaph in the church of St. Hilary at Poictiers, beginning “Vermibus hic ponor,” which the people interpreted to mean that a Saint was buried there who undertook to cure children of the worms. Women, accordingly used to scrape the tomb and administer the powder; but the clergy, to prevent this absurdity (for Luther had arisen), erected a barrier to keep them off. They soon began, however, to carry away for the same purpose pieces of the wooden bars.[1242]
A diseased woman at Patton, drinking of the water in which the bones of St. Milburge were washed, there came from her stomach “a filthie worme, ugly and horrible to behold, having six feete, two hornes on his head, and two on his tayle.” Brother Porter, in his Flowers of the Saints, tells this, and adds that the “worme was shutt up in a hollow piece of wood, and reserved afterward in the monasterie as a trophy and monument of S. Milburg, untill, by the lascivious furie of him that destroyed all goodness in England, that with other religious houses and monasteries, went to ruin.” Hence the “filthie worme” was lost, and we have nothing now instead but the Reformation.[1243]
Capt. Clarke, in his passage from Dublin to Chester, on the 2d of September, 1733, met with a cloud “of flying insects of various sorts,” which stuck about the rigging of the vessel in a surprising manner.[1244]
De Geer, chamberlain to the King of Sweden, writes (iv. 63) that in January, 1749, at Leufsta, in Sweden, and in three or four neighboring parishes, the snow was covered with living worms and insects of various kinds. The people assured him they fell with the snow, and he was shown several that had dropped on people’s hats. He caused the snow to be removed from places where these worms had been seen, and found several which seemed to be on the surface of the snow which had fallen before, and were covered by the succeeding. It was impossible that they could have come there from under the ground, which was then frozen more than three feet deep, and absolutely impervious to such insects. In 1750, he again discovered vast quantities of insects on the snow, which covered a large frozen lake some leagues from Stockholm. Preceding and accompanying both these falls of insects were violent storms that had torn up trees by the roots, and carried away to a great distance the surrounding earth, and at the same time the insects which had taken up their winter quarters in it.[1245] These insects were chiefly Brachyptera L., Aphodii, Spiders, caterpillars, and particularly the larvæ of the Telephorus fuscus.[1246] Another shower of insects is recorded to have fallen
in Hungary, November 20, 1672;[1247] another, also, in the newspapers of July 2d, 1810, to have fallen in France the January preceding, accompanied by a shower of red snow.[1248]
In the Muses Threnodie, p. 213, we read that “many are the instances, even to this day, of charms practised among the vulgar, especially among the Highlands, attended with forms of prayer. In the Miscellaneous MS., written by Baillie Dundee, among several medicinal receipts I find an exorcism against all kinds of worms in the body, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, to be repeated three mornings, as a certain remedy.”[1249]
The Guahibo, Humboldt says, that “eats everything that exists above, and everything under ground,” eats insects, and particularly scolopendras and worms.[1250] The same traveler also says he has seen the Indian children drag out of the earth centipedes eighteen inches long, and more than half an inch broad, and devour them.[1251]