282 CULICID^ — GNATS. 



doe more sliarplj wound them, than all their enemies' 

 swords and speares, which can seldom come nigh them." 



Stewart says that the negroes of Jamaica, who cannot 

 afford mosquito-nets, get into a mechanical habit of driving 

 away these troublesome nocturnal visitors, that even when 

 apparently wrapt in profound sleep, there is a continual 

 movement of the hands.^ 



Herodotus says : "The means devised by the Egyptians 

 to avoid the Gnats, which swarm in prodigious numbers, 

 are these : Those who reside at some elevation above the 

 marshes, avail themselves of towers which they ascend to 

 sleep ; for the Gnats, to avoid the winds, do not fly high. 

 While those who dwell on the very margins of the marshes, 

 instead of towers, practise another contrivance. Everyman 

 possesses a net, which, during the day, he employs in catch- 

 ing fish, and which at night he uses as his bed-chamber, 

 where he places it over his couch, and so sleeps ^^^thin it. 

 For if any one," he concludes, " sleeps wrapped in a cloak 

 or cloth, the Gnats will bite him through it; but they never 

 attempt to penetrate the net."^ With regard to the con- 

 clusion of Herodotus, that nets with meshes will effectually 

 exclude Gnats, Tennent says he has "been satisfied by 

 painful experience that (if the theory be not altogether 

 fallacious) at least the modern mosquitoes of Ceylon are 

 uninfluenced by the same considerations which restrained 

 those of the Nile under the successors of Cambyses."^ 



Jackson complains that after a fifty-miles journey in 

 Africa, the Gnats would not suffer him to rest, and that his 

 hands and face appeared, from their bites, as if he was in- 

 fected with the small-pox in its worst stage.* Dr. Clarke 

 relates that in the neighborhood of the Crimea, the Russian 

 soldiers are obliged to sleep in sacks to defend themselves 

 from the mosquitoes ; and even this, he adds, is not a suffi- 

 cient security, for several of them die in consequence of 

 mortification produced by these furious blood-suckers.^ 



When we consider these circumstances, it is not incredi- 

 ble that the army of Julian the Apostate should be so 



1 View of Jamaica, p 91. 



2 Herod. Taylor's Trans., p. 141. 



3 Nat. Hist, of Cei/lon, p. 435, 

 * Jackson's Morocco, p. 57. 



& Travels, i. 388. 



