364 PULICTAN POWER 



honour? and (oh! the burlesque on human greatness !) have 

 they not there seen a Napoleon mounted on a flea charger ? 



The flea, as compared with the generality of insects, is a 

 long-liver, for the Italian, Bertolotti, speaks of having kept 

 one for twenty-three months, when it died apparently of age, 

 having grown gradually darker till it became nearly black. 

 In the days of its prime, its herculean task was to track a 

 man of war ; as its strength declined, its task-master lightened 

 that stupendous load to ten links of gold chain, and on 

 growing yet weaker, the venerable prisoner was released even 

 from this splendid misery ; but then, alas ! its leaps, from 

 two hundred times the length of its own body, could not 

 clear an inch, and at last it could scarcely crawl across its 

 prison. 



We all owe our consequence to some sort of power ; and to 

 the power of its muscles is the flea indebted for the best part of 

 its celebrity. The extraordinary amount of muscular force, as 

 displayed in its stupendous leaps, attracted very early the 

 curious and observant; and Socrates measuring the leap of a 

 flea figures in the "Clouds " of the satirical Aristophanes. And, 

 in sooth, our agile little vaulter can take a leap worth measuring, 

 for in reaching to the distance of two hundred times its own 

 length, it is, in proportion to its size, as if a man should leap 

 from three to four hundred yards. 



This marvellous power must have first put it into the head 

 of some ingenious person to display both his own mechanic 

 skill and the flea's strength, by turning the latter into a little 

 draught animal, in which capacity it has been proved capable 

 of drawing three hundred and sixty times its own weight. 

 Mouffet, writing in the reign of Elizabeth, mentions an Eng- 

 lish mechanic named Mark, who constructed a chain of gold 

 as long as his finger, which with lock and key were dragged 

 along by a single flea. 



In Bingley's "Animal Biography" are related other the 

 like instances of human ingenuity and insect prowess ; and 



