and then—­

 “Quid dicam innumeros bene eruditos
 Quorum tu monumenta tu labores
     Isti pessimo ventre devorasti?”

while Petit, who was evidently moved by strong personal feelings against the “invisum pecus,” as he calls him, addresses his little enemy as “Bestia audax” and “Pestis chartarum.”

But, as a portrait commonly precedes a biography, the curious reader may wish to be told what this “Bestia audax,” who so greatly ruffles the tempers of our eclectics, is like.  Here, at starting, is a serious chameleon-like difficulty, for the bookworm offers to us, if we are guided by their words, as many varieties of size and shape as there are beholders.

Sylvester, in his “Laws of Verse,” with more words than wit, described him as “a microscopic creature wriggling on the learned page, which, when discovered, stiffens out into the resemblance of a streak of dirt.”

The earliest notice is in “Micrographia,” by R. Hooke, folio, London, 1665.  This work, which was printed at the expense of the Royal Society of London, is an account of innumerable things examined by the author under the microscope, and is most interesting for the frequent accuracy of the author’s observations, and most amusing for his equally frequent blunders.

In his account of the bookworm, his remarks, which are rather long and very minute, are absurdly blundering.  He calls it “a small white Silver-shining Worm or Moth, which I found much conversant among books and papers, and is supposed to be that which corrodes and eats holes thro’ the leaves and covers.  Its head appears bigg and blunt, and its body tapers from it towards the tail, smaller and smaller, being shap’d almost like a carret. . . .  It has two long horns before, which are streight, and tapering towards the top, curiously ring’d or knobb’d and brisled much like the marsh weed called Horses tail. . . .  The hinder part is terminated with three tails, in every particular resembling the two longer horns that grow out of the head.  The legs are scal’d and hair’d.  This animal probably feeds upon the paper and covers of books, and perforates in them several small round holes, finding perhaps a convenient nourishment in those husks of hemp and flax, which have passed through so many scourings, washings, dressings, and dryings as the parts of old paper necessarily have suffer’d.  And, indeed, when I consider what a heap of sawdust or chips this little creature (which is one of the teeth of Time) conveys into its intrals, I cannot chuse but remember and admire the excellent contrivance of Nature in placing in animals such a fire, as is continually nourished and supply’d by the materials convey’d into the stomach and fomented by the bellows of the lungs.”  The picture or “image,” which accompanies this description, is wonderful to behold.  Certainly R. Hooke, Fellow of the Royal Society, drew somewhat upon his imagination here, having apparently evolved both engraving and description from his inner consciousness.[1]