DIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 57 



high as his shoulders ; and, dropping the creature, he observed six marks 

 upon his hand where the six feet had stood. 1 



You may now possibly think that I have nearly gone through the cata- 

 logue of our personal assailants of the insect tribes. If such, however, is 

 your expectation, I fear you will be disappointed, since I have many more, 

 and some tremendous ones, to enumerate : but as a small compensation 

 for such a detail of evils and injuries to which our species is exposed from 

 foes seemingly so insignificant, and of acts of rebellion of the vilest and 

 most despised of our subjects against our boasted supremacy, the objects 

 to which I shall next call your attention are not, like most of our apterous 

 enemies, calculated to excite disgust and nausea when we see them or 

 speak of them ; nor do they usually steal upon us during the silent hours 

 of repose (though I must except here the gnat or mosquito), but are many 

 of them very beautiful, and boldly make their attack upon us in open day, 

 when we are best able to defend ourselves. Borne on rapid wings, 

 wherever they find us, they endeavour to lay us under contribution, and 

 the tribute they exact is our blood. Wonderful and various are the 

 weapons that enable them to enforce their demand. What would you 

 think of any large animal that should come to attack you with a tremen- 

 dous apparatus of knives and lancets issuing from its mouth ? Yet such 

 are the instruments by means of which the fire-eyed and blood-thirsty 

 horse-fly (Tabanus L.) makes an incision in your flesh ; and then, forming a 

 siphon of them, often carries off many drops of your blood. 3 The pain 

 they inflict, when they open a vein, is usually very acute. A fly of this 

 kind not only occasioned Mr. Sheppard considerable pain by its bite, 

 but also produced swelling and blackness round one eye ; and the flesh of 

 his cheek and chin was so enlarged from it as to hang down. And 

 Mr. W. S. MacLeay thus describes to me the annoyance he suffered from 

 one of them. " I went down the other day to the country, and was fairly 

 driven out of it by the Hcsmatopota pluvialis, which attacked me with such 

 fury, that although I did not at last venture beyond the door without a 

 veil, my face and hands were swelled to that degree as to be scarcely yet 

 recovered from the effects of their venom. I was obliged, on my return to 

 town, to stay two days at home. Whenever this insect bites me it has 

 this effect, and I have never been able to discover any remedy for the 

 torture it puts me to." In this country, however, the attacks of these 

 flies are usually not frequent enough to make them more than a minor 

 "misery of human life;" but the burning -fly (brulof) or sand-fly of Ame- 

 rica 3 and the West Indies, which seem to be the same insect, causes a 

 much more intolerable anguish, which has been compared to what a red- 

 hot needle or a spark of fire would occasion us to endure. Lambert, in 



1 Two similar instances of effects on the human system, resembling electric 

 shocks, produced by insects, have been communicated to "the Entomological Society 

 by Mr. Yarrell ; one, mentioned in a letter from Lady de Grey, of Groby, in which 

 the shock was caused by a beetle, one of the common Elateridce, and extended from 

 the hand to the elbow on suddenly touching the insect; the other caused by a large 

 hairy lepidopterous caterpillar, picked up in South America by Capt. Blakeney, R.N., 

 who felt on touching it a sensation extending up his arm, similar to an electric 

 shock, of such force that he lost the use of the arm for a time, and his life was even 

 considered iyx danger by his medical attendant. (Trans. Ent. Soc. Lond. Hi. proc. 

 viii. xxiii.) 



2 One took eight drops from Reaumur, iv. 230. 



3 Bartram's Travels, 383. 



