DIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 137 



ful tumours ^ Gmelin says that it remains beneath the 

 skin of the abdomen six months, penetrating deeper, if it 

 be disturbed, and becoming so dangerous as sometimes 

 to occasion death. The imago he describes as being of 

 a brown colour, and about the size of the common house- 

 fly ; so that it is a small species compared with the rest 

 of the genus. Even the gad-fly of the ox, leaving its 

 proper food, has been known to oviposit in the jaw of a 

 woman, and the bots produced from the eggs finally 

 caused her death ^. — Other flies also of various kinds thus 

 penetrate into us, either preying upon our flesh, or get- 



tino- into our intestines. Leeuwenhoek mentions the case 

 o 



of a woman whose leg had been enlarging with glandular 

 bodies for some years. Her surgeon gave him one that 

 he had cut from it, in which were many small maggots : 

 these he fed with flesh till they assumed the pupa, when 

 they produced a fly as large as the flesh-fly <=. — A patient 

 of Dr. Reeve of Norwich, after suffering for some time 

 great pain, was at last relieved by voiding a considerable 

 number of maggots, which agree precisely with those 

 described by De Geer as the larvae of his Musca donies- 

 tica minor ^ {Anthomyia ca7iicularis, Meig.) a fly which 

 he speaks of as very common in apartments'*. — In Para- 

 guay the flesh-flies are said to be uncommonly numerous 

 and noxious. Azara relates ^ that, after a storm, when 

 the heat was excessive, he was assailed by such an army 

 of them, that in less than half an hour his clothes were 

 quite white with their eggs, so that he was forced to 

 scrape them off" with a knife ; adding, that he has known 



* JEssai sur la Geograph . das Plantca, 1 36. 

 *• Clark in Linn. Trans, iii. 3i23, note. 



•^ Lecuw. Epist. Oct. 17, 1687- '' Edinh. Med. and Surg.Journ. 

 ubi supra. I)c Geer, vi. 26, 27. •■ '■2U}. 



