A Spider raiser in France, more recently, is said to have tamed eight hundred Spiders, which he kept in a single apartment for their silk.
De Azara states that in Paraguay a Spider forms a spherical cocoon for its eggs, an inch in diameter, of a yellow silk, which the inhabitants spin on account of the permanency of the color.
The ladies of Bermuda make use of the silk of the Silk-Spider, Epeira clavipes, for sewing purposes.
The Spider-web fabric has been carried so nearly to transparency (in Hindostan) that the Emperor Aureugzebe is said to have reproved his daughter for the indelicacy of her costume, while she wore as many as seven thicknesses of it.
Astronomers employ the strongest thread of Spiders, the one, namely, that supports the web, for the divisions of the micrometer. By its ductility this thread acquires about a fifth of its ordinary length.
Topsel, in his History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents, has the following, which he calls an "old and common verse:
Nos aper auditu praecellit, Aranea tactu, Vultur odoratu, lynx visu, simia gustu.
Which may be Englished thus:
To hear, the boar, to touch, the Spider us excells, The lynx to see, the ape to taste, the vulture for the smells."
"It is manifest," says Moufet, "that Spiders are bred of some aereall seeds putrefied, from filth and corruption, because that the newest houses the first day they are whited will have both Spiders and cobwebs in them." This theory of generation from putrefaction was a favorite one among the ancient writers; see the history of the Scorpion.
MISCELLANEOUS
It may be new to many of our readers, who are familiar with the Elegy in a Country Church-yard, to be told that its author was at the pains to turn the characteristics of the Linnaean orders of insects into Latin hexameters, the manuscript of which is still preserved in his interleaved copy of the "Systema Naturae."
It is related by Boerhaave, in his Life of Swammerdam, that when the Grand Duke of Tuscany was visiting with Mr. Thevenot the curiosities of Holland, in 1668, he found nothing more worthy of his admiration than the great naturalist's account of the structure of caterpillars, — for Swammerdam, by the skillful management of instruments of wonderful delicacy and fineness, showed the duke in what manner the future butterfly, with all its parts, lies neatly folded up in the caterpillar, like a rose in the unexpanded bud. He was, indeed, so struck with this and other wonders of the insect world, disclosed to him by the great naturalist, that he made him the offer of twelve thousand florins to induce him to reside at his court; but Swammerdam, from feelings of independence, modestly declined to accept it, preferring to continue his delightful studies at home.
There is an epitaph in the church of St. Hilary at Poictiers, beginning "Vermibus hic ponor," which the people interpreted to mean that a Saint was buried there who undertook to cure children of the worms. Women, accordingly used to scrape the tomb and administer the powder; but the clergy, to prevent this absurdity (for Luther had arisen), erected a barrier to keep them off. They soon began, however, to carry away for the same purpose pieces of the wooden bars.
A diseased woman at Patton, drinking of the water in which the bones of St. Milburge were washed, there came from her stomach "a filthie worme, ugly and horrible to behold, having six feete, two horns on his head, and two on his tayle." Brother Porter, in his Flowers of the Saints, tells this, and adds that the "worme was shutt up in a hollow piece of wood, and reserved afterward in the monasterie as a trophy and monument of S. Milburg, untill, by the lascivious furie of him that destroyed all goodness in England, that with other religious houses and monasteries, went to ruin." Hence the "filthie worme" was lost, and we have nothing now instead but the Reformation.
Capt. Clarke, in his passage from Dublin to Chester, on the 2d of September, 1733, met with a cloud "of flying insects of various sorts," which stuck about the rigging of the vessel in a surprising manner.
De Geer, chamberlain to the King of Sweden, writes (iv. 63) that in January, 1749, at Leufsta, in Sweden, and in three or four neighboring parishes, the snow was covered with living worms and insects of various kinds. The people assured him they fell with the snow, and he was shown several that had dropped on people's hats. He caused the snow to be removed from places where these worms had been seen, and found several which seemed to be on the surface of the snow which had fallen before, and were covered by the succeeding. It was impossible that they could have come there from under the ground, which was then frozen more than three feet deep, and absolutely impervious to such insects. In 1750, he again discovered vast quantities of insects on the snow, which covered a large frozen lake some leagues from Stockholm. Preceding and accompanying both these falls of insects were violent storms that had torn up trees by the roots, and carried away to a great distance the surrounding earth, and at the same time the insects which had taken up their winter quarters in it. These insects were chiefly Brachyptera h., Aphodii, Spiders, caterpillars, and particularly the larvae of the Telephorus fuscus. Another shower of insects is recorded to have fallen in Hungary, November 20, 1672; another, also, in the newspapers of July 2d, 1810, to have fallen in France the January preceding, accompanied by a shower of red snow.
In the Muses Threnodie, p. 213, we read that "many are the instances, even to this day, of charms practised among the vulgar, especially among the Highlands, attended with forms of prayer. In the Miscellaneous MS., written by Baillie Dundee, among several medicinal receipts I find an exorcism against all kinds of worms in the body, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, to be repeated three mornings, as a certain remedy."
The Guahibo, Humboldt says, that "eats everything that exists above, and everything under ground," eats insects, and particularly scolopendras and worms. The same traveler also says he has seen the Indian children drag out of the earth centipedes eighteen inches long, and more than half an inch broad, and devour them.
"The seventeene of March, 1586," says John Stow in his Annales of England, "a strange thing happened, the like whereof before hath not beene heard of in our time. Master Dorington, of Spaldwicke, in the countie of Huntington, esquier, one of his maiesties gentlemen Pensioners, had a horse which died sodainly, and, being ripped to see the cause of his death, there was found in the hole of the hart of the same horse a strange worme, which lay on a round heape in a kail or skin of the likeness of a toade, which, being taken out and spread abroad, was in forme and fashion not easie to be described, the length of which worme divided into many greines to the number of fiftie (spread from the bodie like the branches of a tree), was from the snowte to the ende of the longest greine, seventeene inches, having four issues in the greines, from the which dropped foorth a red water; the body in bignes round about was three inches and a halfe, the colour whereof was very like a makerel. This monstrous worme, found in manner aforesaid, crauling to have got away, was stabbed in with a dagger and died, which, after being dried, was shewed to many honorable persons of the realme."
Dr. Sparrman, in his journey to Paarl, an inland town at the Cape of Good Hope, having filled his insect-box with fine specimens, was obliged to put a "whole regiment of Flies and other insects" round the brim of his hat. Having entered the house of a rich old widow troubled with the gout, for food, he was warned by his servant that if she should happen to see the insects he would certainly be turned out of doors for a conjuror (hexmeester). Accordingly he was very careful to keep his hat always turned away from her, but all would not do — the old lady discovered the "little beasts," and to her greater astonishment that they were run through their bodies with pins. An immediate explanation was demanded; and had the doctor not been just then lamenting with the widow for her deceased husband, and giving dissertations on the dropsy and cough that carried off the poor man, the explanation he gave would hardly have been sufficient to quell the rage of this superstitious boor at the thought of there being a sorcerer in her house.
In several parts of Europe quite a trade is carried on in the way of buying and selling rare insects, chiefly the rare Alpine butterflies and moths. The instant the entomologist steps from his carriage, in the celebrated valley of Chamouni, with net in hand, whence he is known to be a papillionist, he is surrounded by half a dozen Savoyard boys, from the age of fifteen down to eight, each with a large collecting-box full of insects in his hands for sale, and with the scientist bargains for the insects that are found only on the mountains, and which these hardy chaps alone can obtain. There are again insect dealers on a larger scale, who live there, and have many of these boys in their employ; one of which wholesale merchants, Michel Bossonney, at Martigni in the Vallais, in the year 1829, sold 7000 insects, mostly of rare and beautiful species. Another dealer, on a perhaps still larger scale, is M. Provost Duval, of Geneva, a highly respectable entomologist. In 1830, he could supply upwards of 600 species of Lepidoptera, and as many Coleoptera, of the Swiss Alps, the south of France, and Germany, at prices varying from one to fifteen francs each, according to their rarity.
The advantage of this new traffic, both to the individuals engaged in it and to science, is great. Now the Sphinx (Deilephila) hippophaes, formerly sold at sixty francs each, and of which one of the first discovered specimens was sold for two hundred francs, is so plentiful, in consequence of the numbers collected and reared through their several stages, by the peasants all along the course of the Arve, where the plant, Hippophae rhamnoides, on which the larvae feed, and the imago takes its specific name, grows in profusion, that a specimen costs but three francs. A general taste also for the science, and an appreciation for beauty, is spread by the more striking Alpine species, such as Parnassius apollo and Galichroma alpina, not only among the travelers who buy them for their beauty, who before would hardly deign to look upon an insect, but among the more ignorant Alpine collectors themselves.
Navarette, under the head of "Insects and Vermin," speaks of an animal which the Chinese call Jen Ting, or Wall-dragon, because it runs up and down walls. It is also, says this traveler, called the Guard of the Palace, and this for the following reason: The emperors were accustomed to make an ointment of this insect, and some other ingredients, with which they anointed their concubines' wrists, as the mark of it continued as long as they had not to do with man; but as soon as they did so, it immediately vanished, by which their honesty or falsehood was discovered. Hence it came that this insect was called the Guard of the Court, or, of the court ladies. Navarette laments that all men have not a knowledge of this wonderful ointment.
Navarette tells us he once caught in China a small insect that was injurious to poultry — "a very deformed insect, and of a strange shape" — when, as soon as it was known, several women ran to him to beg its tail. He gave it to them, and they told him it was of excellent use when dried, and made into powder, "being a prodigious help to women in labor, to forward their delivery, if they drank it in a little wine."