(Vol. vi., p. 263.)
Up to a very recent period, it was held, even by philosophers, that each of
the four elements, as well as every _living_ plant and animal, both {228}
brute and human, generated insects; but of all sources of this equivocal
generation, none was considered more potent than the putrefaction or
corruption of animal matter: as Du Bartas says:
"God, not contented to each kind to give,
And to infuse the virtue generative,
By His wise power, made many creatures breed,
Of _lifeless bodies_ without Venus' deed."
_Sixth Day._
Pliny, after giving Virgil's receipt for making bees, gives similar
instances:
"Like as dead horses will breed waspes and hornets; and asses carrion,
turne to be beetle-flies by a certaine metamorphosis which Nature
maketh from one creature to another."--Lib. xi. c. xx.
And soon after he says of wasps:
"All the sorte of these live upon flesh, contrarie to _the manner of
bees, which will not touch a dead carcasse_."
This brings Shakepeare's lines to mind:
" 'Tis seldom when the bee doth leave her comb
In the _dead carrion_."
_Henry IV._, Part II. Act IV. Sc. 4.
The _Belfast News Letter_ of Friday, Aug. 10, 1832, gives one of these rare
occurrences:
"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
"Caesar," 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.
The equivocal generation of bees is copiously dwelt on in Bochart's
_Hierozoicon_, London, 1663, fol., Part II. p. 502. Instances of their
attaching themselves to dead bodies, in spite of their ordinary antipathy,
are given at p. 506.