TASTE IN INSECTS. 39 



caught expressly to ascertain the fact. This appears 

 the more strange, that several dragon flies [Libellu- 

 lina, Mac Leay) were found as much infested with 

 them as the marbled butterfly. We also more than 

 once found them on field crickets, ants, and beetles, 

 and once on a harvest spider [Phalangium Opilio).* 

 Another species [Gamasus Coleoptratoriim, Fabr.) 

 indiscriminately infests the common dung-beetle and 

 the humble-bee [Bombus terrestris), so as often to 

 destroy them ; a circumstance which, from its fre- 

 quent occurrence, may have caught the observation of 

 persons who otherwise pay little attention to insects. 

 The parasite which thus infests the bee and the 

 dung-beetle, however, is not so pertinacious in ad- 

 hering to its victim as those which died of hunger 

 rather than quit our butterfly specimens. The bee 

 mite, on the contrary, though not very easily dislodged 

 while the insect is alive, immediately scampers oft" as 

 soon as it dies, and even long before, when it becomes 

 sickly from the irritation of the numbers by which it 

 is infested, as we have often witnessed by confining 

 insects thus attacked. Whether this arises from their 

 finding it more difficult to penetrate the skin, or from 

 their not relishing the diseased fluids, we cannot tell. 

 That the latter is the more probable reason, appears 

 from another curious fact connected with out im- 

 mediate subject, namely, that fleas and other para- 

 sitic insects never infest a person who is near death ; 

 and so frequently has this been observed, that it 

 has become one of the popular signs of approach- 

 ing dissolution. This is in all probability caused by 

 the alteration in the state of the fluids immediately 

 under the skin, either in quality or quantity. It must 

 be upon the same principle that women and children 

 are always more infested with the bed-bug ( Cimex 

 ledularius) and other parasitic insects, than old men, 



* J. R. 



VOL. XII. 3*^ 



