The learned Nicholas Perotti[247] gives the earliest account of this strange disorder. Nobody had the least doubt that it was caused by the bite of the _tarantula_[248][249], a ground-spider common in Apulia; and the fear of this insect was so general, that its bite was in all probability much oftener imagined, or the sting of some other kind of insect mistaken for it, than actually received. The word _tarantula_ is apparently the same as _terrantola_, a name given by the Italians to the stellio of the old Romans, which was a kind of lizard[250], said to be poisonous, and invested by credulity with such extraordinary qualities, that, like the serpent of the Mosaic account of the Creation, it personified, in the imaginations of the vulgar, the notion of cunning, so that even the jurists designated a cunning fraud by the appellation of a “stellionatus”[251]. Perotti expressly assures us that this reptile was called by the Romans _tarantula_; and since he himself, who was one of the most distinguished authors of his time, strangely confounds spiders and lizards together, so that he considers the Apulian tarantula, which he ranks among the class of spiders, to have the same meaning as the kind of lizard, called ἀσκαλαβώτης[252], it is the less extraordinary that the unlearned country people of Apulia should confound the much dreaded ground-spider with the fabulous star-lizard[253], and appropriate to the one the name of the other. The derivation of the word tarantula, from the city of Tarentum, or the river Thara, in Apulia[254], on the banks of which this insect is said to have been most frequently found, or at least its bite to have had the most venomous effect, seems not to be supported by authority. So much for the name of this famous spider, which, unless we are greatly mistaken, throws no light whatever upon the nature of the disease in question. Naturalists who, possessing a knowledge of the past, should not misapply their talents by employing them in establishing the dry distinction of forms, would find here much that calls for research, and their efforts would clear up many a perplexing obscurity.