146 INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 



unable to touch a morsel of the food he has earned by 

 his labours. He flies to the shade, evidently in great 

 uneasiness, where he stands continually stamping from 

 the pain produced by the insertion of the weapons 

 sheathed in the proboscis of a little fly (Stomox7/s cal- 

 citrans) before noticed as attacking- ourselves '*. This 

 alights upon him sometimes in one place and sometimes 

 in another, and never lets him rest while the day lasts. 

 — See him again when in harness and travelling. He 

 is bathed in blood flowing from innumerable wounds 

 made by the knives and lancets of various Tabani, 

 which assail him as he goes, and allow him no respite *• ; 

 and consider that even this is nothing to what he suffers 

 in other climates from the same pest. In North Ame- 

 rica, vast clouds of different species — so abundant as to 

 obscure every distant object, and so severe in their bite 

 as to merit the appellation of burning flies — cover and 

 torment the horses to such a degree as to excite com- 

 passion even in the hearts of the pack-horsemen. Some 

 of them are nearly as big as humble bees ; and, when 

 they pierce the skin and veins of the unhappy beast, 

 make so large an orifice that, besides wliat they sucJi, 

 the blood flows down its neck, sides, and shoulders in 

 large drops like tears, till, to use Bartram's expres- 

 sion, "they are all in a gore of blood." Acari also, 

 both the dog-tick and the American tick before men- 

 tioned, especially the latter, infest the horse. Kalm 

 affirms, that he has seen the under parts of the belly, 

 and other places of the body, so covered by them, that 



' See above, p. 112. " Once travelling through Cambridge- 



shire with a brother entomologist in a gig, our horse was in the condition 

 here described, from the attack of I'abanus rvslicus, L. 



