In consequence of their numbers, independently of their carnivorous propensities, they are driven to eat anything that comes in their way; and, besides devouring every species of kitchen-stuff, they gnaw clothes, leather, and books. They likewise pollute everything they crawl over, with an unpleasant nauseous smell.
These “black-beetles,” however, as they are commonly called, are harmless when compared with the foreign species, the giant cockroach (Blatta gigantea), which is not content with devouring the stores of the larder, but will attack human bodies, and even gnaw the extremities of the dead and dying.—(Drury’s Illustrations of Nat. Hist. iii. Pref.)
Cockroaches, at least the kind that is most abundant in Britain, hate the light, and never come forth from their hiding-places till the lights are removed or extinguished (the Blatta Germanica, however, which abounds in some houses, is bolder, making its appearance in the day, and running up the walls and over the tables, to the great annoyance of the inhabitants). In the London houses, especially on the ground-floor, they are most abundant, and consume everything they can find—flour, bread, meat, clothes, and even shoes. As soon as light, natural or artificial, appears, they all scamper off as fast as they can, and vanish in an instant.
These pests are not indigenous to this country, and perhaps nowhere in Europe, but are one of the evils which commerce has imported. In Captain Cook’s last voyage, the ships, while at Husheine, were infested with incredible numbers of these creatures, which it was found impossible by any means to destroy. Every kind of food, when exposed only for a few minutes, was covered with them, and pierced so full of holes, that it resembled a honeycomb. They were so fond of ink that they ate out the writing on labels. Captain Cook’s cockroaches were of two kinds—the Blatta Orientalis and Germanica.—(Encyc. Britan.)
The following fact we give from Mr. Douglas’s World of Insects:—
“Everybody has heard of a haunted house; nearly every house in and about London is haunted. Let the doubters, if they have the courage, go stealthily down to the kitchen at midnight, armed with a light and whatever other weapon they like, and they will see that beings of which Tam o’Shanter never dreamed, whose presence at daylight was only a myth, have here ‘a local habitation and a name.’ Scared from their nocturnal revels, the creatures run and scamper in all directions, until, in a short time, the stage is clear, and, as in some legend of diablerie, nothing remains but a most peculiar odour.
“These were no spirits, had nothing even of the fairy about them, but were veritable cockroaches, or ‘black-beetles’—as they are more commonly but erroneously termed—for they are not beetles at all. They have prodigious powers of increase, and are a corresponding nuisance. Kill as many as you will, except, perhaps, by poison, and you cannot extirpate them—the cry is, ‘Still they come.’
“One of the best ways to be rid of them is to keep a hedgehog, to which creature they are a favourite food, and his nocturnal habits make him awake to theirs. I have known cats eat cockroaches, but they do not thrive upon them.”
“One article of their food would hardly have been suspected,” says Mr. Newman, in a note communicated to the Entomological Society, at the meeting in February, 1855. “‘There is nothing new under the sun;’ so says the proverb. I believed, until a few days back, that I possessed the knowledge of a fact in the dietary economy of the cockroach of which entomologists were not cognisant, but I find myself forestalled; the fact is ‘as old as the hills.’ It is, that the cockroach seeks with diligence and devours with great gusto the common bed-bug.