“Our prices are too high for the street-sellers. Your street-seller can only afford to sell an article made by a person in but a very little better position than himself. Even our small boxes cost at the trade price two shillings a dozen, and when sold will only produce three shillings; so you can imagine the profit is not enough for the itinerant vendor.
“Bakers don’t use much of our paste, for they seem to think it no use to destroy the vermin—beetles and bakers’ shops generally go together.”[250]
If a black beetle enters your room, or flies against you, severe illness and perhaps death will soon follow. I have never heard this superstition but in Maryland.
Mantidæ—Soothsayers, etc.
We now come to a very extraordinary family of insects, the Mantidæ. “Imagination itself,” as Dr. Shaw well observes, “can hardly conceive shapes more strange than those exhibited by some particular species.”[251] “They are called Mantes; that is, fortune-tellers,” says Mouffet, “either because by their coming (for they first of all appear) they do
show the spring to be at hand, as Anacreon, the poet, sang; or else they foretell death and famine, as Cælias, the scholiast of Theocritus, writes; or, lastly, because it always holds up its fore-feet, like hands, praying, as it were, after the manner of their divines, who in that gesture did pour out their supplications to their gods. So divine a creature is this esteemed, that if a childe aske the way to such a place, she will stretch out one of her feet and show him the right way, and seldome or never misse. As she resembleth those diviners in the elevation of her hands, so also in likeness of motion, for they do not sport themselves as others do, nor leap, nor play, but walking softly she returns her modesty, and showes forth a kind of mature gravity.”[252]
The name Mantis is of Greek origin, and signifies diviner. In one of the Idylls of Theocritus, however, it is employed to designate a thin, young girl, with slender and elongated arms. Præmacram ac pertenuem puellam μαντιν. Corpore prælongo, pedibus etiam prælongis, locustæ genus.
These insects, Mantis oratoria, religiosa, etc., in consequence of their having, as Mouffet says, their fore-feet extended as if they were praying, are called in France, Devin, and Prega-diou or Prêche-dieu; and with us, Praying-insects, Soothsayers, and Diviners. They are also often called from their singular shape Camel-crickets.
The Mantis was observed by the Greeks in soothsaying;[253] and the Hindoos displayed the same reverential consideration of its movements and flight.[254]
But, in modern times, the superstition respecting the sanctity of the Mantis begins in Southern Europe, and is found in almost every other quarter of the globe, at least wherever a characteristic species of the insect is found.