Cardan, Albertus, Gaudentinus, Mizalduo, and many others have asserted that perpetual lights can be produced from the Glow-worm; and that waters distilled from this insect afford a lustre in the night. It is needless to say these assertions are without foundation.[174]
In India, the ladies have recourse to Fire-flies for ornaments for their hair, when they take their evening walks. They inclose them in nets of gauze.[175] And the beaux of Italy, Sir J. E. Smith tells us, are accustomed in the summer evenings to adorn the heads of the ladies with Glow-worms, by sticking them also in their hair.[176]
Never kill a Glow-worm, if you do, the country people say, you will put "the light out of your house,"--_i.e._ happiness, prosperity, or whatever blessing you may be enjoying.
A Glow-worm, in your path, denotes brilliant success in all your undertakings. If one enters a house, one of the heads of the family will shortly die. These superstitions obtain in Maryland.
Of the Glow-worm--_Noctiluca terrestris_, Col. Ecphr., i. 38--Dr. James says: "The whole insect is used in medicine, and recommended by some against the Stone. Cardan ascribes an anodyne virtue to it."[177]
Mr. Ray, in his travels through the State of Venice, says: "A discovery made by a certain gentleman, and communicated to me by Francis Jessop, Esq., is, that those reputed meteors, called in Latin _Ignis fatui_, and known in England by the conceited names of _Jack with a Lanthorn_, and _Will with a Wisp_, are nothing else but swarms of these flying Glow-worms. Which, if true, we may give an easy account of those phenomena of these supposed fires, _viz._, their sudden motion from place to place, and leading travelers that follow them into bogs and precipices."[178] It has been suggested[179] also that the mole-cricket, _Gryllotalpa vulgaris_,[180] which in its nocturnal peregrinations was supposed to be luminous, is this notorious "Will-o'-the-wisp."
Pliny says: "When Glow-worms appear, it is a common sign of the ripenesse of barley, and of sowing millet and pannick.... And Mantuan sang to the same tune:
Then is the time your barley for to mow, When Glow-worms with bright wings themselves do show."[181]
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