When Glow-worms with bright wings themselves do show.”[181]
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.