“‘Among the crooked lanes, in every hedge, the Glow-worm lights his gem and through the dark, a moving radiance twinkles.’ The Rev. W. Bingley was, of course, wrong that it was ‘his’ gem, and Glow-worm is a prosaic name for an insect that attracts so much poetic writing. My favourite is John Murray’s suggestion that the luminescence is ‘a hymeneal torch, like the lamp that lighted Leander to Hero’s bower’.”