THE GNAT AND TIPULA, of'^) 



with clouds of those famished insects, iiiiil tiiey arc fmiiid ol all 

 sizes, from six inches long to a minuteness that even requires 

 the microscope to have a distinct perception of them. The 

 warmth of the mid-day sun is too powerful for their constitu- 



liy them, that they were I'urocd to .-lei'ti with thi'ir hciids thrust into h,<\r^ 

 made in the earth with their bayonets, and their legs wrapped round v\ itli 

 theft hammocks. "The gnats in America," says Mouti'et, "do so phi>l' 

 and cut, that they will pierce through very thick clothing ; so that it is ex- 

 cellent sport to behold how ridiculously the barbarous people, when tliey 

 are bitteu, will skip and frisk, and slap with their hands their thighs, but- 

 tocks, shoulders, arms, and sides, even as a carter doth his horses." Weld 

 tells us that " these insects were so powerful and bloodthirsty, that they ac- 

 tually pierced through General Washington's boots." This does not appear 

 very credible, though Mouflet says, " In Italy, near the Fo, great store and 

 very great ones are to be seen, terrible for biting, and venomous, piercing 

 tkrnugh a thiice-dunbled stockitig, anil bootn liAeirise, somelinies leaving be- 

 hind them impoysoned, hard, blue tumours, sometimes painful bladders, 

 sometimes itching pimples, such ;is Hippocrates hath observed in his Epl 

 demies, in the body of one Cyrus, a fuller, being frantic." When we con- 

 eider these circumstances, we cannot justly discredit that they attacked tn 

 fiercely the army of Julian the Apostate as to drive him back ; or that .**« 

 por, king of Persia, as reported, should have been compelled to raise ihw 

 siego of Nisibis by a plague of gnats, which, attacking his elephants and 

 beasts of burden, so caused the route of his army. 



At O.xford, during the summer of llfifi, gnats were sometimes seen to- 

 wards evening in such myriads as literally to darken the rays of the sun. 

 Blr Swinton mentions, that one evening, about half an hour before sunset, 

 lie was in the garden of Wadham College, when he saw six columns of 

 them ascending from the boughs of an apple.tree, some in a perpendicular, 

 and others in an oblique direction, to the height of fifty or sixty feet Their 

 liite was attended with violent inflammation, and when one w;is killed after 

 it had bit, the blood contained in it would cover three or four inches^of wr.ll. 

 About thirty years before this, vast columns of gnats were seen to rise in 

 the air from Salisbury Cathedral, resembling, at a distance, columns of 

 smoke, which made the people imagine the edifice was on fire, .it Sagari, 

 in Silesia, in July, 1812, a similar occurrence gave rise in like manner to an 

 alarm that the church was on fire. The poet Spenser says, the Iri.sh " goo 

 all naked except a mantle, which is a fit house for an outlaw — a lueet bed 

 for a rebel — and an apt cloak for a thiefe. It coucheth him strongly aganist 

 the gnats, which, in that country, doe more to annoy the naked rebels, siid 

 doe more sharply wound them, than all their enemies' swmds and speares, 

 which can seldom cimie nigh them." 



It is worthy of remark that a numerous family are confounded luider the 

 common names of gnat and uuisquito, as if there were only one or two spo- 

 cies ; whereas Mr Stephens has enumerated twenty-two species of the 

 genera Culex and Anopheles, found in IJritain alone ; and hence it is proba- 

 He, the foreign musquitoes are also of several species, though to conunou 

 observers they do not appear to differ from the common gnat. 



The MusQuitO'fly \% very comiu>i'> ''^ Hie woody and niarthy parts of all 



