314 NORTH AMERICAN INSECTS. 



tics, differing here and there mainly in size, it is very diffi- 

 cult to divide them into many different and distinct species. 

 Nor do we propose to attempt it here ; but so common an 

 insect we could not omit, even in our brief history of North 

 American diptera. We trust, however, to see a work on 

 this subject ere long from Baron Osten Sacken, in which 

 all the flies of our country will be properly and scientific- 

 ally classed. 



There are few insects of which man and beast complain 

 so much as of the mosquitoes. It is true that there are 

 insects, such as wasps, bees, and the fleas we have just 

 mentioned, that inflict painful and even dangerous wounds, 

 but no other insect pursues us with such obstinacy, day 

 and night, and is such a universal torment to man, as the 

 mosquito. In some localities, particularly near rivers, lakes, 

 and ponds, the inhabitants can scarcely invent means to 

 protect them from the attacks of these insects ; nor are our 

 cities exempt from them, but almost every where they are 

 found biting and sucking our blood during the day, and at 

 night whistling and singing in our ears, preventing all sleep 

 to those that are not covered with gauze. 



When traveling some years ago in the country of the 

 Czernomorzi, or Cossacks of the Black Sea, we observed 

 before each house of the different slanitzas, or villages, 

 of the Cossacks, large heaps of half-dried manure ignited 

 and smoking, which our driver informed us was for the 

 purpose of keeping off the mosquitoes. Toward evening, 

 on a very hot June day, we ascended the right bank of the 

 muddy and slowly-running River Kuban, on the left bank 

 of which the independent Circassia stretched out before us, 

 when suddenly swarms of small mosquitoes covered us, our 

 servant, and driver, and horses, lighting upon us in lumps 

 an inch thick, and, in spite of all the covering we could 

 hastily throw over us, tormenting us excessively with their 

 bites. 



