"Death's-head moth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mean that big sphinx moth that is commonly known as the 'death's-head moth.' Why the mischief should the people ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... until at last the hedgehog screamed—a thin, piercing wail, most ghastly and pitiful and old, ancient as the cry of the death's-head moth, that faint ghostly shriek as of a tortured witch. Centuries of pain were in it, the age-long terror of weakness bound and helpless beneath the knife, and that something vindictive and terrifying that looks up at the hunter from the eyes of trapped animals and sends the cuckoo fleeing in panic ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... moths is the richly-coloured Acherontia Satanas, one of the Singhalese representatives of our Death's-head moth, which utters a sharp and stridulous cry when seized. This sound has been conjectured to be produced by the friction of its thorax against the abdomen;—Reaumur believed it to be caused by the rubbing of the palpi against the tongue. I have never been able ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent |
