There may be, however, much truth in this remarkable metamorphosis; for, that an insect may strike root into the earth, and, from the co-operation of heat and moisture, congenial to vegetation, produce a plant of the cryptogamic kind, cannot be disputed. Westwood states that he has seen a species of _Clavaria_, both of the undivided and branched kinds, which had sprung from insects, and were four times larger than the insects themselves. In truth, it cannot then be denied that Piso may not have seen a plant of a proportionate magnitude which had likewise grown out of a Mantis. The pupæ of bees, wasps, and cicadas, have been known to become the nidus of a plant, to throw up stems from the front part of the head, and change in every respect into a vegetable, and still retain the shell and exterior appearance of the parent insect at the root. Specimens of these vegetated animals are frequently brought from the West Indies. Mr. Drury had a beetle in the perfect state, from every part of which small stalks and fibers sprouted forth; they were entirely different from the tufts of hair that are observed in a few Coleopterous insects, such as the _Buprestis fascicularius_ of the Cape of Good Hope, and were certainly a vegetable production.[273] Mr. Atwood, in his account of Dominica, describes a “vegetable fly” as follows: “It is of the appearance and size of a small Cock-chafer, and buries itself in the ground, where it dies; and from its body springs up a small plant, resembling a young coffee tree, only that its leaves are smaller. The plant is often overlooked, from the supposition people have of its being no other than a coffee plant, but on examining it properly, the difference is easily distinguished.... The head, body, and feet of the insect appearing at the foot as perfect as when alive.”[274] Dr. Colin, of Philadelphia, has mentioned, also, on the authority of a missionary, a “vegetable fly,” similar to the last mentioned, on the Ohio River.[275] The inhabitants of the Sechell Islands raise the _Mantis siccifolia_, or Dry-leaf Mantis, as an object of commerce and natural history. Achetidæ--Crickets. In the Island of Barbados, the natives look upon the creaking chirp of a species of Cricket, to which Hughes has given the name of the _Ash-colored_ or _Sickly Cricket_, when heard in the house, as an omen of death to some one of the family.[277] In England, also, is the Cricket’s chirp sometimes looked upon as prognosticating death. “When Blonzelind expired,” Gay, in his Pastoral Dirge, says, And shrilling Crickets in the chimney cry’d.[278] So also in Reed’s Old Plays is the Cricket’s cry ominous of death: And the strange Cricket i’ th’ oven sings and hops. The same superstition is found in the following line from the Œdipus of Dryden and Lee: Owels, ravens, Crickets, seem the watch of death.