Water-Clock & Mole-Kricket

Figure One:

Thomas Moffett, "Mole-Kricekt," from The History of Four-Footed Beasts, Serptents, and Insects, 1658.   

Figure Two:

Thomas Moffett, "Water-Clock", from The History of Four-Footed Beasts, Serptents, and Insects, 1658.

Figure Three:

Moffett, "Mole-Kricekt" (detail). 

In two views, belly- and back-up, the water-clock sprawls. Their “hinder feet,” writes Moffett, “they use for oars when they swim” [Figure One] (note 1). In the woodcut it is not the legs but the big, pitchy cornicles—“antennae” we would call them—that predominate. Single lines, heavily inked, they seem scarcely of the piece with the water-clock’s head and body. The water-clocks appear murkily in the verso as well, beneath the mole-kricket, “an Insect ugly to sight and monstrous” [Figure Two] (note 2). This kricket, like the clock, is a single bug viewed variously, from top and right sides. Each aspect records a new moment: the bug was shifted by the naturalist’s hands and drawn a second time. The kricket’s “claws” are, as Moffett writes, “black as a Raven,” but what distinguishes the species are those “4 knobs hanging out as it were of its nostrils and lips” (note 3). The kricket “pleaseth itself with its singing, ... which as soon as the husbandmen hear, they are glad ... as though they knew by its coming, that the earth now teemed with moysture” (note 4). That music, Moffett may have thought, issued not from rubbed legs but from those lips, which present clearly in the first view. The text that describes the kricket does not quite surround it but sits on a plane apart, before it and nearer the reader. The kricket’s space is hard to reckon. The bug in profile seems nearer the text than the bug with its back to us. The kricket is bounded by its text and the letters behind it, which bleed from the recto. But that text, the water-clocks seem set still farther back. Bleeding, that is, installs two planes more. The effect is most pronounced where the leaf bears no print, verso or recto, in the space about the upper kricket’s right foreleg and the lower clock’s right cornicle [Figure Three]. Though it is not inked here, the paper does not appear wholly blank. Thin as it is, the text of preceding leaf’s verso is visible behind the lower clock’s right cornicle. The planes, then, total to six. These effects, the bleed- and the show-through, lend the leaf improbable depth. Water-clocks, writes Moffett, “run about this way and that way upon the surface of the water without order, ... and when the water is troubled, ... they five down to the bottom” (note 5). On recto, the clock surfaces. On the verso—the page turned, the water, that is, roiled—the clock finds the pond’s bottom.

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), 1017.

note 2. Ibid, 1018.

note 3. Ibid.

note 4. Ibid.

note 5. Ibid.