“Romanis in hoc luxuria esse coepit, praegrandesque roborum vermes delicatiore sunt in cibo; cossus vocant.” [47] What are these worms exactly? The Latin naturalist is not very explicit; he tells us nothing at all except that they live in the trunks of oaks. No matter: with this detail we cannot go astray. The worm in question is the larva of the Great Capricorn (Cerambyx heros). [48] A frequent inmate of the oak, it is, in fact, a lusty grub and attracts one’s attention by its resemblance to a fat, white sausage. But the expression prægrandesque roborum vermes should, to my thinking, be generalized a little. Pliny was no precisian. Having occasion to speak of a big worm, he mentions that of the oak, the commonest of the larger ones; and he overlooks the others or takes them for granted, probably failing to distinguish them from the first. Let us not keep too strictly to the tree mentioned in the Latin text, but consider what the old author had really in mind when he spoke of these worms. We shall find other worms no less worthy of the title of Cossus than the Oak-worm, for instance the worm of the chestnut-tree, the larva of the Stag-beetle. One indispensable condition must be fulfilled to earn the celebrated name: the grub must be plump, of a good size and not too repulsive in appearance. Now by a curious freak of scientific nomenclature it happens that the name of Cossus has been allotted to the mighty caterpillar [49] whose galleries honeycomb old willows: a hideous, malodorous creature, the colour of wine-lees. No gullet, not even a Roman’s, would have dared to swallow anything so loathsome. The Cossus of the modern naturalists is certainly not that of the epicures of old. In addition to the larvæ of the Capricorn and the Stag-beetle, which have been identified by the writers with Pliny’s famous worm, I know another which, in my opinion, would fulfil the requisite conditions even better. I will tell you how I discovered it. The short-sighted law of the land has nothing to say to the slayer of noble trees, the unimaginative fool who, for a handful of crown-pieces, pillages the stately woods, lays bare the countryside, dries up the clouds and turns the soil into a parching slag-heap. There was in my neighbourhood a magnificent clump of pine-trees, the joy of the Black-bird, the Thrush, the Jay, and other passers-by, of whom I was one and not the least assiduous. The owner had it cut down. Two or three years after the massacre, I visited the spot.