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Curios Ties Respecting Insects (Spaniards were advancing upon)

the Spaniards were advancing upon them, and immediately betook themselves to their ships: a result as well entitling the elatera to a commemoration feast, as a similar good office by the land-crabs of Hispaniola, which, as the Spaniards tell, (and the story is confirmed by an anniversary Fiesta de los Cangrejos,) by their clattering being mistaken for the sound of Spanish cavalry close upon their heels, in like manner scared away a body of English invaders from the city of St. Domingo.-Walton's Hispaniola, i. 39.

An anecdote less improbable, perhaps, and certainly more ludicrous, is related by Sir James Smith, of the effect of the first sight of the Italian fire-flies upon some Moorish ladies, ignorant of such appearances. These females had been taken prisoners at sea, and, until they could be ransomed, lived in a house in the outskirts of Genoa, where they were frequently visited by the respectable inhabitants of the city; a party of whom, on going one evening, were surprised to find the house closely shut up, and their Moorish friends in the greatest grief and consternation. On inquiring into the cause, they ascertained that some of the Lampyris Italica had found their way into the dwelling, and that the ladies within had taken it into their heads that these brilliant guests were no other than the troubled spirits of their relations; and some time elapsed before they could be divested of this idea. The common people in Italy have a superstition respecting these insects somewhat similar, believing that they are of a spiritual nature, and proceed out of the graves; and hence carefully avoid them. - Tour on the Continent, 2d ed. iii. 85. The insects hitherto adverted to have been beetles, or of the order Coleoptera. But, besides these, a genus in the order Hemiptera, called Fulgora, includes several species, which emit so powerful a light, as to have obtained in English the generic appellation of lantern-flies. Two of the most conspicuous of this tribe are the F. lanternaria and F. candelaria; the former a native of South America, the latter of China. Both, as indeed is the case with the whole genus, have the material which diffuses their light included in a hollow subtransparent projection of the head. In F. candelaria this projection is of a subcylindrical shape, recurved at the apex, above an inch in length, and the thickness of a small quill. We may easily conceive, as travellers assure us, that a tree studded with multitudes of these living sparks, some at rest and others in motion, must during the night have a superlatively splendid appearance.

In F. lanternaria, which is an insect two or three inches long, the snout is much larger and broader, and more of an oval shape, and sheds a light, the brilliancy of which transcends that of any other luminous insect. Madam Merian