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] Ptinidæ--Death-watch, etc. 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 The solemn Death-watch clicks the hour of death. The witty Dean of St. Patrick endeavored to perform this useful task by means of ridicule. And his description, suggested, it would appear, by the old song of “A cobbler there was, and he lived in a stall,” runs thus: