In Sweden the peasants look upon the grub of the Cock-chafer, Melolontha vulgaris, as furnishing an unfailing prognostic whether the ensuing winter will be mild or severe; if the animal have a bluish hue (a circumstance
which arises from its being replete with food), they affirm it will be mild, but on the contrary if it be white, the weather will be severe: and they carry this so far as to foretell, that if the anterior be white and the posterior blue, the cold will be most severe at the beginning of the winter. Hence they call this grub Bemärkelse-mask—prognostic worm.[138]
An absurd notion obtains in England that the larvæ of the May-bugs are changed into briers.[139]
The following quotation is from the Chronicle of Hollingshed: “The 24 day of Februarie (1575), being the feast of Saint Matthie, on which dai the faire was kept at Tewkesburie, a strange thing happened there. For after a floud which was not great, but such as therby the medows neere adioning were covered with water, and in the after noone there came downe the river of Seuerne great numbers of flies and beetles (Melolontha vulgaris?), such as in summer evenings use to strike men in the face, in great heapes, a foot thicke above the water, so that to credible mens judgement there were seene within a paire of buts length of those flies above a hundred quarters. The mils there abouts were dammed up with them for the space of foure daies after, and then were clensed by digging them out with shovels: from whence they came is yet unknowne but the daie was cold and a hard frost.”[140]
Such another remarkable phenomenon is recorded to have occurred in Ireland, in the summer of 1688. The Cock-chafers, in this instance, were in such immense numbers, “that when,” as the chronicler, Dr. Molyneux, relates, “towards evening or sunset, they would arise, disperse, and fly about, with a strange humming noise, much like the beating of drums at some distance; and in such vast incredible numbers, that they darkened the air for the space of two or three miles square. The grinding of leaves,” he continues, “in the mouths of this vast multitude altogether, made a sound very much resembling the sawing of timber.”[141]
In a short time after the appearance of these beetles in
these immense numbers, they had so entirely eaten up and destroyed the leaves of the trees, that the whole country, for miles around, though in the middle of summer, was left as bare as in the depth of winter.
During the unfavorable seasons of the weather, which followed this plague, the swine and poultry would watch under the trees for the falling of the beetles, and feed and fatten upon them; and even the poorer sort of the country people, the country then laboring under a scarcity of provision, had a way of dressing them, and lived upon them as food. In 1695, Ireland was again visited with a plague of this same kind.[142]
In Normandy, according to Mouffet, the Cock-chafers make their appearance every third year.[143] In 1785, many provinces of France were so ravaged by them, that a premium was offered by the government for the best mode of destroying them.[144] During this year, a farmer, near Blois, employed a number of children and the poorer people to destroy the Cock-chafers at the rate of two liards a hundred, and in a few days they collected fourteen thousand.[145]
The county of Norfolk in England seems occasionally to have suffered much from the ravages of these insects; and Bingley tells us that “about sixty years ago, a farm near Norwich was so infested with them, that the farmer and his servants affirmed they had gathered eighty bushels of them; and the grubs had done so much injury, that the court of the city, in compassion to the poor fellow’s misfortune, allowed him twenty-five pounds.”[146]