DIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 141 



suppose, the pill-millepede (Armadillo vulgaris), once a 

 very favourite remedy. What effect they produced in 

 this case I was not informed ; but the learned Bonnet 

 relates that he had seen a certificate of an English phy- 

 sician, dated July 1763, stating that, some time before, a 

 young woman who had swallowed these animals alive, as 

 is usually done, threw up a prodigious number of them 

 of all sizes, which must have bred in her stomach a . 

 Another apterous species appears to have been detected 

 in a still more remarkable situation. Hermann, the 

 author of the admirable Memoire After ologique, whose 

 untimely death is so much to be lamented, informs us 

 that an Acarus figured and described in his work (A. 

 marginatus\ was observed by his artist running on the 

 corpus callo&um of the brain of a patient in the military 

 hospital at Strasbourg, which had been opened but a 

 minute before and the two hemispheres and the pia mater 

 just separated. He adds that this is not the first time 

 that insects have been found in the brain. Cornelius 

 Gemma, in his Cosmocritica, p. 241, says that on dissect- 

 ing the brain of a woman there were found in it abun- 

 dance of vermicles andpunaises b . 



It was customary in many countries in ancient times 

 to punish certain malefactors by exposing them to be de- 

 voured by wild beasts : but to expose them to insects for 

 the same purpose was a refinement in cruelty, which 

 seems to have been peculiar to the despots of Persia. 

 We are informed that the most severe punishment 

 amongst the Persians was that of shutting up the offender 

 between two boats of equal size ; they laid him in one of 

 them upon his back, and covered him with the other, his 



a Bonnet, v. 144. b Mem. Apterolog. 79. 



