What is the meaning of the common idiom? What kind of animal do you mean?

"clues" is a well-known idiom, which comes from Wang Jiaben's "Preface to elegance" in the Qing Dynasty: "the door of opening the door to turning to holiday is extensive, and there are no words in the world that cannot be used, but in fact there are clues, the original, in ancient books." What does that trace mean? What kind of animal do you mean?

What do you mean by clues?

The pinyin means that the spider can be found from the hanging spider silk, and the whereabouts of the spider can be found from the mark of the stove horse (an insect). It is an analogy to the faint traces and clues left by things.

What kind of animal do clues refer to?

Many people think that the "horse trail" in the "trail" refers to the hoof print of the horse. In fact, the "horse" in the "trail" has nothing to do with the mammalian "horse" that pulls the rickshaw and drives the shaft, but refers to the "stove horse," an insect that lives next to the firewood stove.

This small insect, the scientific name "Weta", commonly known as "stove horse", belongs to the family Orthoptera. Its name varies from place to place. Chongqing calls it "stove chicken", Hangzhou calls it "stove wall chicken" and Guangdong calls it "stove shrimp". Stove horses live in both the north and south of China, perching between grass and stone and soil gaps when the weather is warm, and on the hearth after cold weather, feeding on leftovers, rice crumbs, plants and small insects.

In the Tang Dynasty Duan Cheng-style "Youyang Zazhu" Volume 17 "the second part of wide Animation and planting" recorded: "Kitchen horse, such as promoting weaving, slightly larger, long feet, good points on the side of the stove." As the saying goes, if there is a horse in the stove, it is a sign of sufficient food. "

"promoting weaving" means crickets, indicating that the stove horse is not big. "if there is a horse in the stove, there is a sign of sufficient food", indicating that in ancient times, people used to refer to "cooking horse" as "horse" for short.

Li Shizhen, a medical scientist in the Ming Dynasty, also recorded the stove horse in the Compendium of Materia Medica: "the stove horse exists everywhere and lives in burrows." It further illustrates the living habits of the stove horse-often moving on the stove. When the stove horse crawls on the stove, it often leaves a trace that is not easy to detect, which is the "horse track". Because it is as illegible as tiny spider silk, people equate the two and call them "clues", which is used to compare obscure clues to the root of the matter.

Because the stove horse is a kind of small insect, "traces of clues" is often written in "traces of insects". For example, in the 79 chapters of the revelations of the Wild Old Man written by Xia Jingqu, there are words like "traces of insects, leakage of bat saliva in the house, no separation, intentionally or unintentionally, how wonderful it is."