Eucra
Moffett names the wee bug forty times [Figure One]. Lucio, Lucula, Liegth mugk, and Gugle, he lists, Farfalla, Mouch claire, Allachatichi; for the English it is “Glow-worm, Shine-worm, Glass-worm” (note 1). These, Moffett continues, “do glitter in the dark with a wonderful splendor, representing terrestrial stars: insomuch that they seem to contend with candle or moonlight” (note 2). The worms reproduce with extravagant quickness. Some six hours after copulation, the female laid “many eggs ... which within the space of twenty hours went away alive” (note 3). Below the male and female glow-worms and to their left, one offspring appears: “Eucra,” Moffett calls it, “black, thick, and rough” (note 4). Though there is room enough, the compositor has not set the eucra directly beneath the littler, male glow-worm. Instead, the eucra presents in line with the marginalium, “Their description,” left of and above its parents. Speedy as it is, the eucra has left the bounds of the treatise proper, made its way the margins, and would, in one moment more, escape the paper altogether. A reader coming to the open codex might briefly take the printed bug, however roughhewn, for its living deputy. Once we know it is ink merely, the trompe l’oeil becomes a marginal punctuation. It works just as the manicule does, marking some prominent whatnot in the text (note 5). Such metamorphosis, from bug to glyph, signals playfulness on the part of Moffett, his editors, or the pressmen. The glyphic-bug-buggy-glyph comes to acknowledge the medium’s limits. After the trompe l’oeil passes, the pictured creature must become, like the text that describes it, ink and no more, a figure pressed—squashed flat—on the paper’s ground.
note 1. Thomas Moffett, trans. John Rowland, The History of Four-Footed Beasts, Serpents, and Insects (London: Ellen Cotes for George Sawbridge, Thomas Williams, and Thomas Johnson, 1658), 975.
note 2. Ibid, 976.
note 3. Ibid.
note 4. Ibid.
note 5. The eucra crawls to the margins of the earlier Latin edition as well.