“We don’t believe in rat-destroyers; they profess to kill with weasels and a lot of things, and sometimes even say they can charm them away. Captains of vessels, when they arrive in the docks, will employ these people; and, as we say, they generally use our composition, but as long as their vessels are cleared of the vermin, they don’t care to know how it is done. A man who drives about in a cart, and does a great business in this way, we have reason to believe uses a great quantity of our Phosphor Paste. He comes from somewhere down the East-end or Whitechapel way. “Our prices are too high for the street-sellers. Your street-seller can only afford to sell an article made by a person in but a very little better position than himself. Even our small boxes cost at the trade price two shillings a dozen, and when sold will only produce three shillings; so you can imagine the profit is not enough for the itinerant vendor. “Bakers don’t use much of our paste, for they seem to think it no use to destroy the vermin--beetles and bakers’ shops generally go together.”[250] If a black beetle enters your room, or flies against you, severe illness and perhaps death will soon follow. I have never heard this superstition but in Maryland. Mantidæ--Soothsayers, etc. We now come to a very extraordinary family of insects, the _Mantidæ_. “Imagination itself,” as Dr. Shaw well observes, “can hardly conceive shapes more strange than those exhibited by some particular species.”[251] “They are called _Mantes_; that is, fortune-tellers,” says Mouffet, “either because by their coming (for they first of all appear) they do show the spring to be at hand, as Anacreon, the poet, sang; or else they foretell death and famine, as Cælias, the scholiast of Theocritus, writes; or, lastly, because it always holds up its fore-feet, like hands, praying, as it were, after the manner of their divines, who in that gesture did pour out their supplications to their gods. So divine a creature is this esteemed, that if a childe aske the way to such a place, she will stretch out one of her feet and show him the right way, and seldome or never misse. As she resembleth those diviners in the elevation of her hands, so also in likeness of motion, for they do not sport themselves as others do, nor leap, nor play, but walking softly she returns her modesty, and showes forth a kind of mature gravity.”[252] The name _Mantis_ is of Greek origin, and signifies diviner. In one of the Idylls of Theocritus, however, it is employed to designate a thin, young girl, with slender and elongated arms. _Præmacram ac pertenuem puellam μαντιν. Corpore prælongo, pedibus etiam prælongis, locustæ genus._