"_Against stinking vermin called Punesies._--If you rub your bedsteede with squilla stamped with vinaigre, or with the leaves of cedar tree sodden in oil, you shall never feel punese. Also if you set under the bed a payle full of water the puneses will not trouble you at all." Butler, in the first canto of the third part of _Hudibras_, also mentions it thus: "And stole his talismanic louse-- His flea, his morpion, and punaise." If the Querist refers to his French dictionary he will soon discover the meaning of _morpion_ and _punaise_--the latter without doubt the _pinece_ of Bishop Bramhall. Cotgrave, in his _French-English Dictionary_, London, 1650, defines _punaise_ to be "the noysome and stinking vermin called the bed punie." It may be bad taste to dwell any longer on this subject; but as it illustrates a curious fact in natural history, and as it has been well said, that whatever the Almighty has thought proper to create is not beneath the study of mankind, I shall crave a word or two more. The _pinece_ is not originally a native of this country; and that is the reason why, so many years after its first appearance in England, it was known only by a corruption of its French name _punaise_, or its German appellation _wandlaus_ (wall-louse). Penny, a celebrated physician and naturalist in the reign of Henry VII., discovered it at Mortlake in rather a curious manner. Mouffet, in his _Theatrum Insectorum_ (Lond. 1634), thus relates the story: "Anno 1503, dum haec Pennio scriptitaret, Mortlacum Tamesin adjacentem viculum, magna festinatione accersebatur ad duas nobiles, magno metu ex cimicum vestigiis percussas, et quid nescio contagionis valde veritas. Tandem recognita, ac bestiolis captis, risu timorem omnem excussat." Mouffet also tells us that in his time the insect was little known in England, though very common on the Continent, a circumstance which he ascribes to the superior cleanliness of the English: "Munditiem frequentemque lectulorum et culcitrarem lotionem, cum Galli, Germani, et Itali minus curant, pariunt magis hane pestem, Angli autem munditei et cultus studiosissimi rarius iis laborant." Ray, in his _Historia Insectorum_, published in 1710, merely terms it the _punice_ or wall-louse; indeed, I am not aware that the modern name of the insect appears in print previous to 1730, when one Southal published _A Treatise of Buggs_. Southal appears to have been an illiterate person; and he erroneously ascribes the introduction of the insect into this country to the large quantities of foreign fir used to rebuild London after the Great Fire. The word _bug_, signifying a frightful object or spectre, derived from the Celtic and the root of _bogie_, bug-aboo, bug-bear--is well known in our earlier literature. Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton, Beaumont and Fletcher, Holinshed and many others, use it; and in Matthew's _Bible_, the fifth verse of the ninety-first psalm is rendered: