ichnographs, wasps and spoor, and the cockatrice

[eub]

My dad sent me the word "ichnograph", which he found in the Visitor Center of Charleston, SC. All I could guess for it was writing done by or with an ichneumon wasp, or better yet an ichneumon itself, possibly using a brush made of its fine tail-hairs.

No, it's "A ground-plan; the representation of the horizontal section of a building or of part of it (or, rarely, of some object resting on the ground); also, the plan or map of a place." (OED2) From ichnos trace, footprint. Whence also "ichnology", "That part of palaeontology which treats of fossil footprints."

But the ichneumon wasp is not so far away.

Apparently first the ichneumon searcheth out the seats of wilde Beasts

1607 Topsell Four-f. Beasts (1658) 349
Marcellus and Solinus, do make question of this Beast (Ichneumon) to be a kinde of Otter, or the Otter a kinde of this Ichneumon,..it diligently searcheth out the seats of wilde Beasts, especially the Crocodile and the Asp, whose Egs it destroyeth.

and then

The name had been already applied by Aristotle to ‘a small kind of wasp that hunts spiders’; partly from which, partly in reference to the old stories as to the entry of the mammalian ichneumon into the body of the crocodile, Linnaeus applied it to the parasitic flies.

these old stories being

1572 J. Bossewell Armorie iii. 17b
Called a Mouse of Indie, otherwise Ichneumon, a beaste of Egypte of the greatnes of a Catte..who creepeth into the body of a Crocodyle, when in sleape he gapeth and eating his bowels, sleaeth him.

The OED also remarks

(With the early fabulous accounts cf. cockatrice, = calcatrix, in origin a L. translation of [the Greek ichneumon].)

But that's another story.