More Minor Horrors

The first things to notice about the biscuit-‘weevil,’ so familiar to readers of Marryat’s novels, is that it is not a weevil at all, and that it attacks a great many other comestibles besides biscuits. The so-called biscuit-‘weevil’ is in truth an Anobium—Anobium paniceum—a member of the family Ptinidae and is closely allied to A. striatum, which makes the little round holes in worm-eaten furniture, so cleverly imitated by the second-hand furniture-dealers. Another species of Anobium (recently re-christened Xestobium tessellatum), a somewhat larger insect, is destructive in churches, libraries, and old houses. Their mysterious tappings (which are really efforts to attract the other sex—mere flirtations) are the cause of much superstitious dread in the nervous, and this species is known as the ‘greater death-watch.’

But to return to the biscuit-‘weevil.’ The mature insect is about a quarter of an inch long, and lives at large; it is the larva which burrows into and attacks the dried biscuit—the ‘hard-tack’ of the Navy. Less of a woodborer than its allies, it nevertheless attacks almost any vegetable substance; and Butler tells us that ‘rhubarb-root, ginger, wafers, and even so unlikely a substance as Cayenne pepper have been greedily devoured by it.’ Several generations have been known to flourish on a diet of opium, and it has been found in tablets of compressed meat. Vegetable matter, even in an altered state—such as paper—affords it an ample meal; and in one case the larva of an Anobium paniceum bored steadily in a straight line through twenty-seven folio volumes in a public library, and so straight was the tunnel that a string could be passed through it from end to end. In one of our libraries at Cambridge some Arabic manuscripts were almost entirely destroyed by the larvae, which do not hesitate to browse on drawings and paintings and the dried paper of herbaria.

The larva of this beetle is in truth a book-worm. Its interest for us in the present series is, however, the disastrous infestation of ships’ biscuits, which frequently is so severe that the sailors ‘hard-tack’ is rendered uneatable. Heating, of course, kills it; but the biscuits are still uneatable. The dead larvae are as unpalatable as the living. The contrivance of biscuit-tins since Marryat’s time has done much to lessen the evils. Tradition has it that a great firm and a great fortune had their foundations laid, during the first half of the last century, by the accidental contiguity of a baker’s shop and that of a tinsmith.