144 . Zoological Society. 



mud or mire, which when dry coats them over hke armour, and en- 

 ables them to stand their ground against this winged assassin ; yet I 

 have found some of these tubercles upon almost every elephant and 

 rhinoceros that I have seen, and attribute them to this cause. All 

 the inhabitants of the sea- coast of Melinda, down to Cape Gardefan, 

 Saba, and the south coast of the Red Sea, are obliged to put them- 

 selves in motion and change their habitation to the next sand in the 

 beginning of the rainy season, to prevent all their stock of cattle from 

 being destroyed. 



" Of all those that have written upon these countries, the prophet 

 Isaiah alone has given an account of this animal and the manner of 

 its operation (Isaiah, vii. 18, 19) : ^ And it shall come to pass in that 

 day, that the Lord shall hiss for the fly that is in the uttermost part 

 of the rivers of Egypt .... and they shall come, and shall rest all of 

 them in the desolate valleys, and in the holes of the rocks, and upon 

 all thorns, and upon all bushes.' " (Travels, ii. pp. 314-317.) 



" Tsaltsalya, or Fly. — We are obliged with the greatest surprise 

 to acknowledge that those huge animals, the elephant, the rhinoceros, 

 the lion and the tiger, inhabiting the same woods, are still vastly this 

 fly's inferiors; and that the appearance of this small insect, nay, his 

 very sound, though he is not seen, occasions more trepidation, move- 

 ment and disorder, both in the human and brute creation, than whole 

 herds of these monstrous animals collected together, though their 

 number was in a tenfold proportion greater than it really is. Provi- 

 dence from the beginning it would seem had fixed its habitation to 

 one species of soil, being a black fat earth, extraordinarily fruitful. 



" We cannot read the history of the plagues which God brought 

 upon Pharaoh by the hands of Moses, without stopping a moment to 

 consider a singularity, a very principal one, which attended the plague 

 of the fly. The land of Goshen, the possession of the Israelites, was 

 a land of promise which was not tilled or sown, because it was not 

 overflowed by the Nile. But the land overflowed by the Nile was the 

 black earth of the Valley of Egypt, and it was here that God confined 

 the flies. — I have magnified him about twice the natural size. — He 

 has no sting, though he seems to me to be rather of the bee kind ; 

 but his motion is more rapid and sudden than that of the bee, and 

 resembles that of the gad-fly in England. There is something par- 

 ticular in the sound or buzzing of this insect. It is a jarring noise, 

 together with a humming, which induces me to believe that it pro- 

 ceeds, at least in part, from a vibration made with the three hairs at 

 his snout. 



** The Chaldee Version is content with calling this animal simply 

 Zebub, which signifies the fly in general as we express it in English. 

 The Arabs call it Arob in their translation, which has the same gene- 

 ral signification. The Ethiopic translation calls it Tsal tsalya, which 

 is the true name of this particular fly in Geez, and was the same in 

 Hebrew. The Greeks have called this species of fly Cynomyia, which 

 signifies the dog-fly ; in imitation of which, those I suppose of the 

 church of Alexandria that, after the coming of Frumentius, were cor- 

 recting the Greek copy and making it conformable to the Septuagint, 



