DIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 93 



You may now possibly think that I have nearly gone through the cata- 

 logue of our personal assailants of the insect tribes. If such, however, is 

 your expectation, I fear you will be disappointed, since I have many more, 

 and some tremendous ones, to enumerate : but as a small compensation 

 for such a detail of evils and injuries to which our species is exposed from 

 foes seemingly so insignificant, and of acts of rebellion of the vilest and 

 most despised of our subjects against our boasted supremacy, the objects 

 to which I shall next call your attention are not, like most of our apterous 

 enemies, calculated to excite disgust and nausea when we see them or 

 speak of them ; nor do they usually steal upon us during the silent hours 

 of repose (though I must except here the gnat or mosquito), but are many 

 of them very beautiful, and boldly make their attack upon us in open 

 day, when we are best able to defend ourselves. Borne on rapid wings, 

 wherever they find us, they endeavor to lay us under contribution, and 

 the tribute they exact is our blood. Wonderful and various are the wea- 

 pons that enable tliem to enforce their demand. What would you think 

 of any large animal that should come to attack you with a tremendous 

 apparatus of knives and lancets issuing from its mouth ? Yet such are 

 the instruments by means of which the fire-eyed and blood-thirsty horse- 

 fly (Tahanus L.) makes an incision in your flesh ; and then, forming a 

 siphon of them, often carries off many drops of your blood. ^ The pain 

 they inflict, when they open a vein, is usually very acute. A fly of this 

 kind not only occasioned Mr. Sheppard considerable pain by its bite, but 

 also produced swelling and blackness round one eye ; and the flesh of his 

 cheek and chin was so enlarged from it as to hang down. And Mr. W. 

 S. MacLeay thus describes to me the annoyance he suffered from one of 

 them. " 1 went down the other day to the country, and was fairly driven 

 out of it by the Htemato'pota pluvialis, which attacked me with such fury, 

 that although I did not at last venture beyond the door without a veil, my 

 face and hands were swelled to that degree as to be scarcely yet recovered 

 from the efl:ects of their venom. I was obliged on my return to town to 

 stay two days at home. Whenever this insect bites me it has this eftect, 

 and I have never been able to discover any remedy for the torture it puts 

 me to." In this country, however, the attacks of these flies are usually 

 not frequent enough to make them more than a minor " misery of human 

 life ;" but the burning-fly (brulot) or sand-fly of America^ and the West 

 Indies, which seem to be the same insect, causes a much more intolerable 

 anguish, which has been compared to what a red-hot needle or a spark of 

 fire would occasion us to endure. Lambert, in his Travels through 

 Canada, &,c. says, " They are so very small as to be hardly perceptible 

 in their attacks ; and your forehead will be streaming with blood before 

 you are sensible of being amongst them^:" — and Captain Back, in his 

 Journey to the Arctic Sea (p. 117.), speaking of the misery occasioned 

 by these little tormentors, the brulots (including also mosquitos), observes, 



denly touching the insect ; the other, caused by a larg:e hairy lepidopterous caterpillar, 

 picked up in South America by Capt. Blakeney, R. N., who felt on touching it a sensation, 

 extending up his arm, similar to an electric shock, of such force that he lost the use of the 

 arm for a time, and his life was even considered in danger by his medical attendant. 

 ( Trans. Ent. Soc. Lond. iii. proc. viii. xxiii.) 



» One took eight drops from Reaumur, iv. 230. ^ Bartram's Travels, 383. 



^ i. J27. The West India sand-fly was noticed by the late Robinson KiUoe, Esq., who 

 however did not recollect their fetching blood. 



