sion where he was interested in the health of a poor Esquimaux, and thereby sadly embarrassed the doctor.

At the entrance of the tent stand a male and a female figure clad in their seal skin costume, elaborately embroidered with tawed leather and wampum beads. During the long residence of our professor amongst this people, his European garments wore out, as before mentioned, and he was obliged in self defence to adopt theirs. His shirt he described as being a very comfortable and tasteful garment, but rather uninviting in the preparation. It was composed of the skins of the Greenland diver (Columbus glacialus) previously steeped in animal brine, the long feathers of which were pulled out by the teeth of the seamstress, and the internal adhering blubber sucked out by her lips. The offer of this bonne bouche is a high personal compliment, and the refusal to taste is quite as serious a breach of sociability as that of an American Indian to smoke a calumet.

Beside the Esquimaux hut above mentioned, lies the identical bed which our traveller slept in during his seven years sojourn in Greenland. It consists of the huge skin of the white arctic bear, sewed up in the shape of a bag with the fur outwards; near it lies the paw, nine inches across the palm. Into this bag M. Giesecke nightly crept, clothes and all, and completed his simple preparations for repose by drawing the flap hood over his head. The introduction of this skin into the museum of the Royal Dublin Society has been productive of a misfortune that was not anticipated. It contained the eggs of a nondescript species of moth, whose ravages in the larvae state have been most destructive to furs and feathers. Year after year its progeny were secreted, and its attacks renewed with an industry that baffled all attempts to extirpate them. Numbers of valuable preserved beasts and birds were cut to pieces or crumbled to dust by them. The bear skin was submitted to repeated beatings and purifications, but in vain! Still the moth's eggs remained and vivified, and the work of destruction still went on. Amongst other damages, we have to deplore the loss of the fine case of Greenland birds, which they so injured as at length to render it necessary to

throw the entire away. It would have been better policy to have, in the first instance, burnt all the specimens attacked by this plague, for the species has since been disseminated through the city to a serious extent. The sparrows that built in the walls in the vicinity of the lawn of the Society house, commenced the mischief by carrying away to their nests all the loose hairs, beaten and shaken out of the bear skin on the grass, to which the eggs were attached as usual by the provident mother-moths. These eggs were hatched in due season in the same nest with those of their unconscious feathered nurses, and all the larvae that escaped instant destruction finally distributed their winged progeny far and near. About two years since, some stuffed birds, sent from Dublin to a museum in Belfast, were the means of introducing the eggs into that town also, where the ravages of the insect soon brought it into a deeply lamented notoriety amongst naturalists. As this animal seems destined, by its devouring organization, to create a sensation in European museums, we shall devote a little space to a description of its nature and habits, as we are not aware that any notice of either has hitherto appeared in print.

Each moth lays some hundreds of eggs immediately previous to its decease, which generally occurs in June, but great differences are found in this respect, resulting from the situation or local climate in which the parent had itself been born and reared. Thus, in the warm museum of the Royal Dublin Society, these eggs are laid in the month of May, and hatched in three or four weeks after, while in colder situations, the caterpillars do not appear till September; the times varying according to the shelter or exposure in which the mother moth may place them. The eggs are small, hard, and brown; and are found deposited in rows along the feathers or hairs of preserved skins, or any other animal substance which may serve the future larvæ for food.

When these come forth, they begin to prey voraciously, cutting the furs or feathers across above their insertion, at the same time gradually preparing a covering in which they wrap their delicate bodies, and ever afterwards carry about in their

incessant predatory excursions. This covering appears to be formed by interweaving and agglutinating quantities of the hairs and feathers which they cut off and leave undevoured, herein exhibiting the same instinct that belongs to the grub of the may-fly (commonly called corbait) which attaches together little sticks and stones to defend itself in the streams that it inhabits. The larvæ are very gregarious and grow rapidly, still adding to their cocoons (as the snails do to their shells) till they attain a length of about 1 inch, when they are found with a dull grey body and a reddish brown head. The body is very soft and tender; a touch is almost sufficient to destroy it. The animal possesses, however, a high degree of cunning, and on the slightest appearance of danger or disturbance, rolls away and drops like a spider by a silk thread till it reaches the ground, leaving its cocoon armour behind, which it can regain by the same thread. It continues in the caterpillar state for nine or ten months, manifesting in this respect a great contrariety of habit to the silk worm, which remains in the larva form a few weeks only, but lies quiescent in the previous egg state for several months of autumn, winter, and spring. The Greenland caterpillar, perhaps, resembles most of all that of the Tinea Tigrenus. It is of equal size, lives gregariously, and possesses the same faculty of ascending and descending by a thread. That which the Tigrenus employs seems to be of a cottony fabric. As our Greenland caterpillar's existence approaches its first great change, it becomes more choice in its food, is under the necessity of travelling over a greater space to find it, and of biting right and left to allow its conglomerate cocoon to pass also. In thick furs or plumage it does not bite so deep as amongst scanty shelter; concealment in its travels being apparently one of its objects. It leaves a profusion of excrementitious matter in its path, in the shape of small black grains polished like the finest gunpow

der. It possesses an extraordinary power of resisting the applications of poisonous ingredients amongst which it is often obliged to work its way by the precautionary art of the furrier and taxidermist,* as the following observations made by Mr. Richard Glennon, in the museum of the Royal Dublin Society, will illustrate. He had prepared the skins of some stuffed birds with a dry powder which consisted of arsenic, sulphur, snuff, and powdered alum, and naturally expected that the specimens so impregnated would become very repulsive subjects for the appetites of his enemies, the Greenland caterpillars. He was, however, greatly surprised to find the poisoned plumage cut up indiscriminately with others, and that the cocoons of the little marauders who traversed it were studded with specks of powder, which, when examined by a magnifying glass and chemical tests, proved to be particles of the arsenic, sulphur, snuff, and alum, which the insect had, in its ordinary vocation of building its cocoon, taken in quantity, and agglutinated amongst the rest. On the completion of its cocoon, it only remains a few days wrapped up, and then emerges as a moth, somewhat larger than either the saddle moth or that of the Tinea Tigrenus. The male is only about half the size of the female. and its colours are lighter and not so well defined. The thorax is a dark brown, the face and proboscis covered with snow white plumes, the eyes brown and beautifully irridescent by reflected light; its head appears as if divided vertically into two lobes; the antennæ are long, slender, and pointed, marked with alternate brown and white rings. The wings are banded with three colours; on the shoulder dark brown, in the middle light grey, and on the extremities a pepper and salt colour. The wings underneath, and all the body, are light drab colour. The two hinder legs are long and covered with fine brown and white hairs.

They begin to fly about in the dark of the evening, and continue on the

There was a time when the friends of any Irishman who happened to be found "dead" or drowned," which, after all, is much the same thing, never thought of getting a coroner to "sit upon the body," as it is frequently termed; but this was before Barney Bradley's time. There was a time when Irishmen brewed their own beer, and wore strange wigs; but this was also before Barney Bradley's time. There was a time when Irishmen were industrious, lived in rude comfort, and slept in bed o' nights; but this was before the coercion bill and Barney Bradley's time. There was also a time when Irishmen loved whiskey and fighting, and hated guagers, which time was long before Barney Bradley's time, and will be long after it. This now is the time we speak of;—rather a brief space, to be sure, extending only from the days of Adam to the present, and from the present to the end of secula seculorum. We say from Adam's time, for Barney, who was a walking book of knowledge, could have told you that when Adam was thrust out of paradise, he set up a private still; "an' more betoken," added Barney, "a murdherin' fine time it was, in regard that divil a guager or red coat durst show his face." Barney, in fact, was very learned upon the history of malt drink, and could, if you believed him, disclose the receipt from which the Danes used to make beer from heather. In this boast, to be sure, he went in the very teeth of tradition, which affirms that the Danes kept the knowledge of such an invaluable secret to themselves; "bekase," says tradition, "if Irishmen had known it, they'd have earlier leathered the murdherin' villains clane out o' the counthry." But at all events Barney without scruple frequently put himself not only against tradition, but against Scripture. "Sure whin Noah," said he, "pressed the grapes, what does it mane barrin' distillin' the sup o' malt?" When contradicted on this point, by his friend Darby M'Fudge, Barney VOL. III.

replied, "Keep your jaw asy, Darby ; what do you know about it? Sure its only the highflown way that Scripture has. I can't shave you if you be spakin'." Now this last observation usually silenced his antagonist, and we will tell you why. Barney, though no barber either by education or profession, carried such a smooth hand at the razor, that his house was crowded every Sunday morning with his village friends, from whose faces he reaped with the greatest dexterity their week's crop of beard. There are few villages in Ireland that do not contain such a character as Barney Bradley, and every one of them is famous for anecdote or story telling: but whether the operation of shaving naturally produces the power of invention, or this imaginative faculty their expertness at shaving, we leave to modern philosophy to determine. The subject is too slippery for us, who are no philosophers at all. Here then follows a loose outline of Barney, whom the reader will be kind enough to take, upon our authority, as the representative of his class. Within the bounds of his own parish he was a well known man; and in his own village the best authority under the sun upon any given subject. His cabin stood in the very centre of the hamlet, a perfect pattern of houses inhabited by men who hate work and scorn comfort. The roof was covered with a coat of rotten thatch, long dissolved into black dirt, over which grew large lumps here and there of green and flourishing chicken weed. When Barney's wife had put down a fresh fire, you might see the smoke oozing through the roof in all directions, and spreading so complacently in dusky clouds over its surface, that on a calın day very little else except the smoke could be seen. As you entered it, two stone steps brought you over a pool that lay, two thirds of it at least outside the door, one third inside. good stride brought you to the middle of the floor, where you found Barney, with a beard two inches long upon his

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