AN IMPERIAL FLEA. 55 



little |- ests in great abundance, and rendered it a difficult matter to 

 dislodge them from their quarters. Any one again afflicted in 

 this manner would do well to remember the advice given by old 

 Tusser in Lis " Points of Goode Husbandry :" 



" While wormwood hath seed, get a handfull or twainc 

 To save against March, to make flea to refraine: 

 Where chamber is sweeped, and wormwood is strown, 

 No flea for his life dare abide to be known." 



But if that remedy should not suffice, it would not be amis-, 

 perhaps, to catch a few of the ringleaders, and make an example 

 of them, by plying then with round shot, in the way Christina, 

 Queen of Sweden, is said to have done with the Lilliputian piece 

 of ordnance still exhibited to the curious in the arsenal of 

 Stockholm. 



Not long since, at one of the meetings of the Entomological 

 Society, Mr, Westwood exhibited what was described as a new 

 species of Flea, of monstrous size, which had just previously 

 been found in a bed at Gateshead. The name proposed for the 

 monster was Pulex imperator, a style and title the perfect pro- 

 priety of which was xinquestionable for a monster twenty times 

 larger than the Common Flea ! It did not appear whether the 

 stranger was a nondescript species imported from abroad, or a na- 

 tive Briton then first brought to light. In either case the prospect 

 was not an agreeable one. The common Bed-Bug was a stranger 

 amongst us once, though in many of our London lodging-houses 

 we will of course assume that it is never seen elsewhere it is 

 now very literally a " terror by night ;" and who was to say 

 that this imperial blood-sucker might not get a footing amongst 

 us ? Fortunately we need be under no anxiety : a few months 

 after the discovery was first announced, Sir. Westwood again 

 brought his gigantic Flea before the Entomological Society : this 

 time, however, it was for the purpose of explaining that Pulex 

 imperator turned out to be no Flea at all, but the mutilated 

 body of a young Cockroach ! The origin of the mistake was 

 satisfactorily accounted for, and the Imperial Flea was erased 

 from the list of British insects a great loss to science, no doubt, 

 but one which, domestically speaking, we can bear very com- 

 placently. 



If there be any one insect which more than another deserves 



