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.

Our cousins in the United States, so fortunate in many things, seem very
fortunate in this--their books are not attacked by the "worm"--at any
rate, American writers say so. True it is that all their black-letter
comes from Europe, and, having cost many dollars, is well looked after;
but there they have thousands of seventeenth and eighteenth century
books, in Roman type, printed in the States on genuine and wholesome
paper, and the worm is not particular, at least in this country, about
the type he eats through, if the paper is good.

Probably, therefore, the custodians of their old libraries could tell
a different tale, which makes it all the more amusing to find in
the excellent "Encyclopaedia of Printing,"[1] edited and printed by
Ringwalt, at Philadelphia, not only that the bookworm is a stranger
there, for personally he is unknown to most of us, but that his
slightest ravages are looked upon as both curious and rare. After
quoting Dibdin, with the addition of a few flights of imagination of his
own, Ringwalt states that this "paper-eating moth is supposed to have
been introduced into England in hogsleather binding from Holland." He
then ends with what, to anyone who has seen the ravages of the worm in