The merry cricket, puling fly, With the red capp'd worm that's shut Brown as his tooth; a little moth Late fatten'd in a piece of cloth, With wither'd cherries, mandrakes' ears, Moles' eyes; to these the slain stag's tears; The unctuous dewlaps of a snail; The broke heart of a nightingale O'ercome in music; -This done, commended Grace by his priest, the feast is ended.” — Having considered insects as adding to the general stock of food, I shall next request your attention while I detail to you how far the medical science is indebted to them. Had I addressed you a century ago, I could have made this an ample history. Amongst scores of infallible panaceas, I should have recommended the wood-louse as a solvent and aperient; powder of silk-worm for vertigo and convulsions; millepedes against the jaundice; earwigs to strengthen the nerves; powdered scorpion for the stone and gravel; fly-water for disorders in the eyes; and the tick for erysipelas. I should have prescribed five gnats as an excellent purge; wasps as diuretics; lady-birds for the colic and measles; the cockchafer for the bite of a mad dog and the plague; and ants and their acid I should have loudly praised as incomparable against leprosy and deafness, as strengthening the memory, and giving vigour and animation to the whole bodily frame. In short, I could have easily added to the miserably meagre list of modern pharmacopoeias, a catalogue of approved insectremedies for every disease and evil "that flesh is heir to!" But these good times are long gone by. You would, I fear, laugh at my prescriptions notwithstanding the great authorities I could cite in their 1 For this list of remedies, see Lesser, L. ii. 171–173. At the favour; and even doubt the efficacy of a more modern specific for toothache, promulgated by a learned Italian professor', who assures us that a finger once imbued with the juices of Rhinobatus antiodontalgicus (a name enough to give one the toothache to pronounce it) will retain its power of curing this disease for a twelvemonth! I must content myself, therefore, with expatiating on the virtues of the very few insects to which the sons of Hippocrates and Galen now deign to have recourse. same time I cannot help observing that their proscription of the remainder may have been too indiscriminate. Mankind are apt to run from one extreme to the other. From having ascribed too much efficacy to insectremedies, we may now ascribe too little. Many insects emit very powerful odours, and some produce extraordinary effects upon the human frame; and it is an idea not altogether to be rejected, that they may concentrate into a smaller compass the properties and virtues of the plants upon which they feed, and thus afford medicines more powerful in operation than the plants themselves. It is at least worth while to institute a set of experiments with this view. Medicine at the present day is indebted to an ant (Formica bispinosa Oliv., fungosa F.) for a kind of lint collected by that insect from the Bombax or silk cotton-tree, which as a styptic is preferable to the puff-ball, and at Cayenne is successfully used to stop the blood in the most violent hæmorrhages; and gum ammoniac, according to Mr. Jackson, oozes out of a plant like fennel, from incisions made in the bark by a beetle with a large horn. But, with these exceptions (in which the remedy is rather collected than produced by insects), and that of spiders' webs, which are said to have been recently administered with success in ague, the only insects which directly supply us with medicine are some species of Cantharis and Mylabris. These beetles however amply make up in efficacy for their numerical insignificance; and almost any article could be better spared from the Materia Medica than one of the former usually known under the name of Cantharides, which is not only of incalculable importance as a vesicatory, but is now administered internally in many cases with very good effect. In Europe, the insect chiefly used with this view is the Cantharis vesicatoria; but in America the C. cinerea and vittata (which are extremely common and noxious insects, while the C. vesicatoria is sold there at sixteen dollars the pound) have been substituted with great success, and are said to vesicate more speedily, and with less pain, at the same time that they cause no strangury: and in China they have long employed the Mylabris cichorei, which seems to have been considered the most powerful vesicatory amongst the ancients, who however appear to have been acquainted with the common Cantharis vesicatoria also, and to have made use of it, as well as of Cetonia aurata and some other insects mentioned by 1 Gerbi. Storia Naturali d'un Nuov. Inset. 1794. The same virtues have been ascribed to Coccinella septempunctata, L. 2 Latr. Hist. Nat. des Fourmis, 48. 134. 3 Jackson's Marocco, 83. Some doubt, however, attaches to this statement, from the circumstance of the figure which Mr. Jackson gives of his beetle (Dibben Fashook) being clearly a mere copy of that of Mr. Bruce's Zimb. 4 This insect, generally so rare in England, appeared in the summer of 1837 in great numbers in Essex, Suffolk, and the Isle of Wight. (Ent. Mag. v. 208. 516.) 5 Illiger, Mag. i. 256. Pliny. Another species of Mylabris has been described by MajorGeneral Hardwicke in the Asiatic Transactions, plentiful in all parts of Bengal, Bahar, and Oude, which is fully as efficacious as the common Spanish fly; and in other parts of India Cantharis gigas and violacea are employed, as is C. ruficeps in Sumatra and Java; C. atomaria in Brazil; C. Syriaca in Arabia; and in some parts of Europe Lydus (Mylabris Fab.) trimaculatus.3 But it is as supplying products valuable in the arts and manufactures that we are chiefly indebted to insects. In adverting to them in this view, I shall not dwell upon the articles derived from a few species in particular districts, and confined to these alone, such as the soap which in some parts of Africa is manufactured from a beetle (Chlanius saponarius 4); the oil which, Molina tells us, is obtained in Chili from large globular cellules found upon the wild rosemary, and supposed to be produced by a kind of gall-fly; and the manure for which Scopoli informs us the hosts of Ephemera that annually emerge in the month of June from the Laz, a river in Carniola, are employed by the husbandmen, who think they have had a bad harvest unless every one has collected at least twenty loads. Still less is it my intention to detain you in considering the purpose to which in the West Indies and South America the fire-flies are put by the natives, who employ them as lanterns in their journeys, and lamps in their houses; or the use as ornaments to which some insects are ingeniously applied by the ladies, who in China embroider their dresses with the elytra and crust of a brilliant species of beetle (Buprestis vittata); in Chili and the Brazils form splendid necklaces of the golden Chrysomelida and brilliant diamond beetles, &c.8; in some parts of the Continent string together for the same purpose the burnished violet-coloured thighs of Geotrupes stercorarius, &c.; and in India, as I am informed by Major Moor and Captain Green, even have recourse to fire-flies, which they inclose in gauze, and use as ornaments for their hair when they take their evening walks. I shall confine my details to the more important and 1 Hist. Nat. 1. xix. c. 4. 2 Vol. v. 213. 3 Westwood's Mod. Class. of Ins. i. 297. See also Burmeister's Manual of Ent. p. 562., who says that the species used by the ancients appears to have been Mylabris Füeslini Panz., which is very abundant in the south of Europe, and is sometimes found in Germany. The active blistering principle in all these insects has been detected by M. Robiquet, and named by him Cantharidine, which has been ascertained by M. Bretonneau, and especially by M. Leclerc, who has examined a great number of insects with this view, to be found amongst coleopterous insects of the family of Cantharide only, though not in all the species of this family, nor even in all the species of the same genus. M. Leclerc, who conceives that Cantharidine is secreted by a peculiar apparatus, states that it is not destroyed either by the action of the air or of time; and as it must exist in a spider of the United States (Tegenaria medicinalis Hentz.; Journ. Acad. Nat. Sci. of Philadelphia, 1821, p. 53. pl. 5.), which is there extensively employed as a vesicatory, he examined if this principle is to be found in the Tegenaria of France or in other spiders, but without success. (Leclerc, Essai sur les Epipastiques, Paris, 1835, quoted in Guérin, Bulletin Zoologique, i. 95.) 4 Carabus Oliv., Entom. iii. 69. t. iii. f. 26. Compare Philanthropist, ii. 210. 5 Molina's Chili, i. 174. 6 Ent. Carniol. 264. 7 Captain Green was accustomed to put a fire-fly under the glass of his watch, when he had occasion to rise very early for a march, which enabled him without difficulty to distinguish the hour. 8 Molina, i. 171. 285. 9 Latr. Hist. Nat. x. 143. general products which they supply to the arts, beginning with one indispensable to our present correspondence, and adverting in succession to the insects affording dyes, lac, wax, honey, and silk. No present that insects have made to the arts is equal in utility and universal interest, comes more home to our best affections, or is the instrument of producing more valuable fruits of human wisdom and genius, than the product of the animal to which I have just alluded. You will readily conjecture I mean the fly that gives birth to the gall-nut, from which ink is made. How infinitely are we indebted to this little creature, which at once enables us to converse with our absent friends and connections, be their distance from us ever so great, and supplies the means by which, to use the poet's language, we can — give to airy nothing A local habitation and a name!" enabling the poet, the philosopher, the politician, the moralist, and the divine, to embody their thoughts for the amusement, instruction, direction, and reformation of mankind. The insect which produces the gall-nut is of the genus Cynips of Linné, but was not known to him or to Fabricius. Oliver first described it under the name of Diplolepis galle tinctoriæ.1 The galls originate on the leaves of a species of oak (Quercus infectoria) very common throughout Asia Minor, in many parts of which they are collected by the poorer inhabitants, and exported from Smyrna, Aleppo, and other ports in the Levant, as well as from the East Indies, whither a part of those collected are now carried. The galls most esteemed are those known in commerce under the name of blue galls, being the produce of the first gathering before the fly has issued from the gall. It will not be uninteresting to you to know, that from these when bruised may occasionally be obtained perfect specimens of the insect, one of which I lately procured in this way. The galls which have escaped the first searches, and from most of which the fly has emerged, are called white galls, and are of a very inferior quality, containing less of the astringent principle than the blue galls in the proportion of two to three. The white and blue galls are usually imported mixed in about equal proportions, and are then called "galls in sorts." If no substitute equal to galls as a constituent part of ink has been discovered, the same may be said of these productions as one of the most important of our dyeing materials constantly employed in dyeing black. It is true that this colour may be communicated without galls, but not at once so cheaply and effectually, as is found by their continued large consumption, notwithstanding all the improvements in the art of dyeing. Other dyeing drugs are afforded by insects, the principal of which are Chermes, the Scarlet Grain of Poland, Cochineal, Lac-lake, and Lac-dye, all of which are furnished by different species of Coccus. The first of these, the Coccus Ilicis, found abundantly upon a small species of evergreen oak (Quercus coccifera), common in the south of France, and many other parts of the world, has been employed to impart a blood red or crimson dye to cloth from the earliest ages, and was known 1 Encyclop. Insect. vi. 281. It had better, perhaps, as compound trivial names are bad, be called Cynips Scriptorum. 2 Olivier's Travels in Egypt, &c. ii. 64. to the Phoenicians before the time of Moses under the name of Tola or Thola (y), to the Greeks under that of Coccus (KOKKOs), and to the Arabians and Persians under that of Kermes or Alkermes; whence, as Beckmann has shown, and from the epithet vermiculatum given to it in the middle ages, when it was ascertained to be the produce of a worm, have sprung the Latin coccineus, the French cramoisi and vermeil, and our crimson and vermilion. It was most probably with this substance that the curtains of the tabernacle (Exod. xxvi. &c.) were dyed, deep red (which the word scarlet, as our translators have rendered nybin, then implied, not the colour now so called, which was not known in James the First's reign when the Bible was translated), - it was with this that the Grecians and Romans produced their crimson; and from the same source were derived the imperishable reds of the Brussels and other Flemish tapestries. In short, previous to the discovery of cochineal, this was the material universally used for dyeing the most brilliant red then known; and though that production of the New World has, in some respects undeservedly1, supplanted it in Europe, where it is little attended to except by the peasantry of the provinces in which it is found, it still continues to be employed in a great part of India and Persia.2 The scarlet grain of Poland (Coccus polonicus) is found on the roots of the perennial knawel (Scleranthus perennis, a scarce plant in this country, but abundant in the neighbourhood of Elvedon in Suffolk), and was at one time collected in large quantities for dyeing red in the Ukraine, Lithuania, &c. But though still employed by the Turks and Armenians for dyeing wool, silk, and, hair, as well as for staining the nails of women's fingers, it is now rarely used in Europe except by the Polish peasantry. A similar neglect has attended the Coccus found on the roots of Poterium Sanguisorbas, which was used by the Moors for dyeing silk and wool a rose colour; and the Coccus Uva-ursi, which with alum affords a crimson dye.4 Cochineal, the Coccus cacti, is doubtless the most valuable product for which the dyer is indebted to insects, and, with the exception perhaps of indigo, the most important of dyeing materials. Though the Spaniards found it employed by the natives of Mexico, where alone it is cultivated, on their arrival in that country in 1518, its true nature was not accurately ascertained for nearly two centuries afterwards. Acosta, indeed, as early as 1530, and Herrara and Hernandez subsequently, had stated it to be an insect: but, led apparently by its external appearance, notwithstanding the conjectures of Lister and assertions of Père Plumier to the contrary, it was believed by Europeans in general to be the seed of a plant, until Hartsoeker in 1694, Leeuwenhoek and De la Hire in 1704, and Geoffroy, 1 The colour communicated by Kermes, with alum, the only mordant formerly employed, is blood red; but Dr. Bancroft found (i. 404.) that with the solution of tin used with cochineal it is capable of imparting a scarlet quite as brilliant as that dye, and perhaps more permanent. At the same time, however, as ten or twelve pounds contain only as much colouring matter as one of cochineal, the latter at its ordinary price is the cheapest. 2 Bochart, Hierozoic. ii. 1. iv. c. 27. Beckmann's History of Inventions, Engl. Trans. ii. 171-205. Bancroft on Permanent Colours, i. 393. See also Parkhurst's 4 Bancroft, i. 401 שנה and תלע Heb. Lericon under 5 Rai. Hist. Plant. i 401. |