"A few days ago, when the sexton was digging a grave in Temple Cranney (a burying-place in Portaferry, co. Down), he came to a coffin which had been there two or three years: this he thought necessary to remove. In this operation, he was startled by a great quantity of wild bees issuing forth from the coffin; and upon lifting the lid, it was found that they had formed their combs in the dead man's skull and mouth, which were full. The nest was made of the hair of the head, together with shavings that had been put in the coffin with the corpse." This quotation is given in an interesting work of Mr. Patterson's, _Letters on the Natural History of the Insects mentioned in Shakspeare's Plays_: London, 1838. Your correspondent R. T. shows that _serpents_ were supposed to be generated by _human_ carcases. Pliny says: "I have heard many a man say that the _marrow of a man's backebone_ will breed to a snake."--_Hist. Nat._, x. 66. The story of the "fair young German gentleman" reminds me of one of a gentle shepherd and his beloved Amarante, told in De Britaine's _Human Prudence_, 12th edit., Dublin, 1726, Part I. p. 171. The corpse of the "Cæsar," seen by St. Augustine and Monica, was most probably that of Maximus, Emperor of the West, slain by the soldiers of Theodosius, A.D. 388. Sir Thos. Browne--"treating of the conceit that the mandrake grows under gallowses, and arises from the fat, or [Greek: ouron], of the dead malefactor, and hence has the form of a man--says: "This is so far from being verified of animals in their corruptive mutations into plants, that they maintain not this similitude in their nearer translation into animals. So when the ox corrupteth into bees, or the horse into hornets, they come not forth in the image of their originals. So the corrupt and excrementitious humours in man are animated into lice: and we may observe that hogs, sheep, goats, hawks, hens, and others, have one peculiar and proper kind of vermin."--_Works_, Bohn's edit., vol. i. p. 197. The editor furnishes the following note: "The immortal Harvey, in his _De Generations_, struck the first blow at the root of the irrational system called _equivocal generation_, when he laid down his brief but most pungent law, _Omnia ex ovo_. But the belief transmitted from antiquity, that living beings generated spontaneously from putrescent matter, long maintained its ground, and a certain modification of it is even still advocated by some naturalists of the greatest acuteness. The first few pages of the volume entitled _Insect Transformations_ (in _The Library of Entertaining Knowledge_) are occupied by a very interesting investigation of this subject."--See also Sir T. Browne's _Works_, vol. i. p. 378., vol. ii. pp. 523, 524.; and Izaak Walton's _Complete Angler_, passim.