THE SO-CALLED BUGONIA OP THE ANCIENTS. 493 



has deuouuced this error. He exonerates Goedart of his supposed 

 mistake and charges Be Mey with it (as I have already explained 

 above). 



It follows from these statements that Swaramerdam was fully aware 

 of the absurdity of the Bugonia craze, but that he did not quite grasp 

 the part played by E. tenax in it, and would not, even in the presence 

 of sufficient evidence, give up his basis for a literal interpretation of 

 the Holy Scriptures. In fact he connects the belief in the Bugonia 

 with the story of the bees of Samson, as if the ancients (Greeks and 

 Romans) knew anything about Samson ! 



Redi, a contemporary of Swammerdam, stood on the same level with 

 him on the question of the Bugonia. Both were adversaries of sponta- 

 neous generation, and nevertheless both misunderstood the story of 

 Samson. Redi {Esperienze^ etc., p. 58) accepts the interpretation of Boc- 

 hart. And with regard to the relation of bee-like flies, and especially 

 oi E. tenax to the Bugonia, both seem to have been in the dark. My 

 Neapolitan edition of Redi (1778) contains a supplement by Girolamo 

 Gaspari* from Verona (?. c, j>. 149), who states quite distinctly that Redi 

 only deuouuced the error, and that it was ValUsnieri who explained its 

 origin by discovering certain bee-like flies which insert their eggs into 

 the skins of animals. But this discovery of Vallisnieri was not quite 

 up to the markf what he discovered were Oestridw of the genus Hypo- 

 derma, and not E. tenax. Hypodermse are bot flies, some of which look 

 more like bumblebees than honeybees; their larvte occur in the skin 

 of oxen and of difterent kinds of deer, including reindeer. Vallisnieri 

 was also mistaken when he took the bot of the horse ( Gastrus equi), whose 

 larva lives in the stomach of this animal, for the representative of the 

 wasp, which the ancient wiiters thought was generated from carcasses 

 of horses. It is a fly of the genus HelophiJus, which passed for a wasp 

 among the ancients; i7eZo2)/<?7?t.s is a close relative of jE/ris'/a7i,s; it has, 

 like EristaUs, a rat-tailed larva, which live in putrescent matter. But 

 in its coloring Eelophilus resembles a wasp (black, with yellow stripes 

 and spots), while EristaUs resembles a bee. And yet that Vallisnieri 

 knew E. tenax maybe inferred from his words: ''That stout and stupid 

 fly, which is bred from certain worms, provided with a tail, and some- 

 times called aquatic intestines {intestini aquaticiy^ (Vallisnieri Esperi- 

 enze, etc., p., 149). On the same page Vallisnieri gives instances of the 

 confusion between the terms of bees and Jfies in ancient authors, and 

 quotes, among others, Lampridius Life of Heliogabalus, chap. 26. I 



entomologica, i, p. 133. I have consulted the fifth edition (1648 -which was kindly 

 lent to me by the Grand Ducal Library in Carlsruhe. Clutius also speaks of the 

 Ocsirida; (p. 10). The "Augerius" (misprinted Augenius) TeferTeA to by Vallisnieri, 

 Esperienze, etc., p. 14 (1726), is evidently the same Clutius. 



' Dr. G. Gaspari {I. c.) quotes from Vallisnieri'a Dialogo fra 'I Malpighi, e Flinio, 

 Venezia, 1700. I have not seen this work, but I possess his, Esperienze ed Osserva- 

 zioni, etc., second edition, 1726. Antonio Vallisnieri (1661-1730) was professor in 

 Padua. 



