CHAP. VI. INTESTINAL FLIES. 221 



marshy districts, where it deposits its eggs in the skin 

 of man, causing most painful tumours. Gmelin says 

 that it remains beneath the skin of the abdomen six 

 months, penetrating deeper if disturbed, and becoming 

 so dangerous as sometimes to occasion death. Even 

 the gadfly of the ox, leaving its proper food, has been 

 known to deposit its eggs in the jaw of a woman ; and 

 the hots, produced from the eggs, finally caused her 

 death. Leeuwenhoek mentions the case of a woman, 

 whose surgeon took from her leg several small maggots; 

 these our naturalist fed with flesh until <they became 

 pupa?, when they produced a fly as large as the flesh 

 fly. Even in England, a patient of Dr. Reeve, of 

 Norwich, after suffering, for some time, great pain, was 

 at last, relieved by voiding a considerable number of 

 maggots, which agree precisely with those described by 

 De Geer as the larvae of a fly very common in apartments. * 

 Azara affirms, \he flesh flies in Paraguay often covered 

 his clothes with their eggs, so that -he was obliged to 

 scrape them off with a knife. He adds, that he has 

 known instances of persons who, after having bled at 

 the nose in their sleep, were attacked by the most 

 violent headaches, when, at length, several great mag- 

 gots, the offspring of these flies, issuing from their 

 nostrils, gave them relief. In Jamaica, the sick and 

 dying are assailed by another species, which lays its 

 eggs in the nose, mouth, or gums. A lady in that 

 island, after recovering from a fever, fell <a victim to 

 the maggots of this fly, which passed from the nose, 

 through the os cribriforme, into the cavity of the skull, 

 and afterwards into the brain. The eminent naturalists, 

 to whose industrious research we are indebted for these 

 details, mentions a shocking case of a poor wretch who 

 was actually eaten to death by myriads of worms, 

 generated in some putrid meat which he had on his 

 person when illness obliged him to lie down in the 

 fields, never again to rise. Even the brain of the 

 human subject is not free from these mysterious tor- 



* De Geer, vol. vi. p. 26, 27. 



