CHAPTER IX. 



CERTAIN PARASITIC INSECTS. 



THE subject of our discourse is not only a disagreeable but 

 too often a painful one. Not only is the mere mention of the 

 creature's name of which we are to speak tabooed and avoided 

 by the refined and polite, but the creature itself has become 

 extinct and banished from the society of the good and respect- 

 able. Indeed under such happy auspices do a large proportion 

 of the civilized world now live that their knowledge of the habits 

 and form of a louse may be represented by a blank. Not so with 

 some of their great-great-grandfathers and grandmothers, if his- 

 tory, sacred and profane, poetry,* and the annals of literature 

 testify aright; for it is comparatively a recent fact in history that 

 the louse has awakened to find himself an outcast and an alien. 

 Among savage nations of all climes, some of which have been 

 dignified with the apt, though high sounding name of Phthiri- 

 ophagi, and among the Chinese and other semi-civilized peoples, 

 these lords of the soil still flourish with a luxuriance and rank- 

 ness of growth that never diminishes, so that we may say with- 

 out exaggeration that certain mental traits and fleshly appetites 



*Ha! whare ye gaun, ye crowlin ferliel 

 Your Impudence protects you sairly: 

 I canua say but ye strunt rarely, 



Owre gauze and lace; 

 Tlio' faith, I fear ye dine but sparely 



On sic a place. 



Ye ugly, creepin, blastlc wonner, 

 Detested, shunn'd by s#unt and sinner, 

 How dare ye set your fit upon her 



Sae fine a lady! 



Gae somewhere else and seek your dinner 

 Oil some poor body. 



(To a Louse. Burns.) 

 (94) 



