my curiosity.  Hardly, however, had I turned the wriggling little victim out upon the leather-covered table, when down came the doctor’s great thumb-nail upon him, and an inch-long smear proved the tomb of all my hopes, while the great bibliographer, wiping his thumb on his coat sleeve, passed on with the remark, “Oh, yes! they have black heads sometimes.”  That was something to know—­another fact for the entomologist; for my little gentleman had a hard, shiny, white head, and I never heard of a black-headed bookworm before or since.  Perhaps the great abundance of black-letter books in the Bodleian may account for the variety.  At any rate he was an Anobium.

I have been unmercifully “chaffed” for the absurd idea that a paper-eating worm could be kept a prisoner in a paper box.  Oh, these critics!  Your bookworm is a shy, lazy beast, and takes a day or two to recover his appetite after being “evicted.”  Moreover, he knew his own dignity better than to eat the “loaded” glazed shoddy note paper in which he was incarcerated.

In the case of Caxton’s “Lyf of oure ladye,” already referred to, not only are there numerous small holes, but some very large channels at the bottom of the pages.  This is a most unusual occurrence, and is probably the work of the larva of “Dermestes vulpinus,” a garden beetle, which is very voracious, and eats any kind of dry ligneous rubbish.

The scarcity of edible books of the present century has been mentioned.  One result of the extensive adulteration of modern paper is that the worm will not touch it.  His instinct forbids him to eat the china clay, the bleaches, the plaster of Paris, the sulphate of barytes, the scores of adulterants now used to mix with the fibre, and, so far, the wise pages of the old literature are, in the race against Time with the modern rubbish, heavily handicapped.  Thanks to the general interest taken in old books now-a-days, the worm has hard times of it, and but slight chance of that quiet neglect which is necessary to his, existence.  So much greater is the reason why some patient entomologist should, while there is the chance, take upon himself to study the habits of the creature, as Sir John Lubbock has those of the ant.

I have now before me some leaves of a book, which, being waste, were used by our economical first printer, Caxton, to make boards, by pasting them together.  Whether the old paste was an attraction, or whatever the reason may have been, the worm, when he got in there, did not, as usual, eat straight through everything into the middle of the book, but worked his way longitudinally, eating great furrows along the leaves without passing out of the binding; and so furrowed are these few leaves by long channels that it is difficult to raise one of them without its falling to pieces.

This is bad enough, but we may be very thankful that in these temperate climes we have no such enemies as are found in very hot countries, where a whole library, books, bookshelves, table, chairs, and all, may be destroyed in one night by a countless army of ants.