MIDGES 169 



human skin is, to the midge, a far grosser defence 

 than the skin of the rhinocerous viewed from the 

 human standpoint. A man who had to bite 

 through the hide of the rhinoceros for a meal 

 would starve in the neighbourhood of plenty. But 

 the midge alights on the (relatively to itself) much 

 thicker human epidermis, and in about five seconds 

 it has bored a shaft through it, and is pumping 

 up its own fill of human gore. It is worth while 

 watching the process out. You are seated on a 

 rock at the loch side, and the midges are " biting 

 bad." A score of them are operating on your 

 hands and wrists, and you cover one of them with 

 a lens. Under the lens you see that its body is 

 a mere thread of transparent grey, but as you 

 watch the colour changes to a lively red. And 

 not only does the colour change. In about a 

 minute and a half the thread -bodied insect becomes 

 a corpulent and distended little sack of blood. It 

 has had the time of its life ; the time that can 

 come to so very few of its kind. 



This is one of the most puzzling of the facts 

 about biting midges. In a non-political address 

 a few years ago Mr. Arthur Balfour surprised 

 some of his hearers by speaking of the human 

 race, which has appropriated so much of the earth's 

 surface to itself, as "a numerically insignificant 

 species." We are in the way of thinking of the 

 tribes of men as fairly numerous. But Mr. Balfour 

 was right. In the district of which I write, twenty 

 square miles of hill territory surrounding a loch, 

 there are many times more midges than there are 

 human beings on the whole earth. Numerically 



