DIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. Ill 



upon US in open day, when we are best able to defend 

 ourselves. Borne on rapid wings, wherever they find 

 us, they endeavour to lay us under contribution, and 

 the tribute they exact is our blood. Wonderful and 

 various are the weapons that enable them to enforce 

 their demand. What would you think of any large 

 animal that should come to attack you with a tremen- 

 dous 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 {Ta- 

 banus, 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. In this country, 

 however, their attacks are not frequent enough to make 

 them more than a minor " misery of human life ;" but 

 the burning-fly (brnlot) 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 

 §mall as to be hardly perceptible in their attacks ; and 

 your forehead will be streaming with blood before you 

 are sensible of being amongst them'^." — Yet we have 



* One took eight drops from Reaumur, iv, 230. Plate VII. Fig. 5. 

 ^ Bartram's Travels^ 383. 



■^ i. 127. The West India sand-fly was noticed by Robin?on Kittoe^ 

 Esq. who however docs not recollect their fetching blood. 



