THE COSMOPOLITE.


SUPERSTITIONS, FABLES, &C. RELATIVE TO ANIMALS.

(_Continued from page 180_.)


The following curious notice of the _Acherontia Atropos_, or Death's-head
Moth, we extract from "The Journal of a Naturalist:"--"The yellow and
brown-tailed moths," he observes, "the death-watch, our snails, and many
other insects, have all been the subjects of man's fears, but the dread
excited in England by the appearance, noises, or increase of insects, are
petty apprehensions compared with the horror that the presence of this
Acherontia occasions to some of the more fanciful and superstitious
natives of northern Europe, maintainers of the wildest conceptions. A
letter is now before me from a correspondent in German Poland, where this
insect is a common creature, and so abounded in 1824 that my informant
collected fifty of them in a potato field of his village, where they call
them the 'death's-head phantom,' the 'wandering death-bird,' &c. The
markings on the back represent to their fertile imaginations the head of a
perfect skeleton, with the limb bones crossed beneath; its cry becomes the
voice of anguish, the moaning of a child, the signal of grief; it is
regarded, not as the creation of a benevolent being, but as the device of
evil spirits--spirits, enemies to man, conceived and fabricated in the
dark; and the very shining of its eyes is supposed to represent the fiery
element whence it is thought to have proceeded. Flying into their
apartments in an evening, it at times extinguishes the light, foretelling