90 NATURAL HISTORY 



their nets, and to give them a reddish cast, while the men are 

 so bitten as to be thrown into fevers. 



There is a small long shining fly in these parts very trouble- 

 some to the housewife, by getting into the chimneys, and lay- 

 ing its eggs in the bacon while it is drying : these eggs pro- 

 duce maggots called jumpers, which, harbouring in the gam- 

 mons and best parts of the hogs, eat down to the bone, and 

 make great waste. This fly I suspect to be a variety of the 

 musca putris of Linnceus : it is to be seen in the summer in 

 the farm-kitchens on the bacon-racks and about the mantel- 

 pieces, and on the ceilings. 



The insect that infests turnips and many crops in the gar- 

 den (destroying often whole fields while in their seedling 

 leaves) is an animal that wants to be better known. The 

 country people here call it the turnip-fly and black dolphin; 

 but I know it to be one of the coleoptera; the " chrysomela 

 " oleracea, saltatoria, femoribus posticis crassissimis." In very 

 hot summers they abound to an amazing degree, and, as you 

 walk in a field or in a garden, make a pattering like rain, by 

 jumping on the leaves of the turnips or cabbages. 



There is an Oestrus, known in these parts to every plough- 

 boy ; which, because it is omitted by Linnceus, is also passed 

 over by late writers, and that is the curvicauda of old Moufet, 

 mentioned by Derham in his Physico-theology, p. 250 : 

 an insect worthy of remark for depositing it's eggs as it 

 flies in so dextrous a manner on the single hairs of the legs 

 and flanks of grass-horses. But then Derham is mistaken 

 when he advances that this Oestrus is the parent of that won- 

 derful star-tailed maggot which he mentions afterwards ; for 

 more modern entomologists have discovered that singular pro- 

 duction to be derived from the egg of the musca chamceleon : 

 see Geoffroy,i. 17, f. 4*. 



* [For the following interesting note on the entomological references in 

 the above letter, I am indebted to my friend Professor Westwood, of Ox- 

 ford. " The entomological notes in Gilbert White's 34th letter require 

 some annotation. The harvest-bug is the Acarus autumnalis of Shaw, 

 generally placed in the genus Leptus\ but as it is only six-legged it is evi- 

 dently only an immature creature, and is probably the young of Trom- 

 bium lapidum, the eggs of which (found on the surface of stones and pebbles 



