68 DIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 



another gnat (Simulium reptans), which, as Linne informs us, who mis- 

 named it a Culex, is so incredibly numerous in Lapland, as entirely to 

 cover a man's body, turning a white dress into a black one, occupying 

 the whole atmosphere, filling the mouth, nostrils, eyes, and ears of tra- 

 vellers, and thus preventing respiration, and almost choking them. These 

 little animals, he &ays, do not bite, but torture incessantly by their titilla- 

 tion. 1 In New South Wales a small ant was observed by Sir Joseph 

 Banks, inhabiting the roots of a plant, which when disturbed rushed out 

 by myriads, and running over the uncovered parts of the body, produced a 

 sensation of this kind that was worse than pain. 



The common house-fly is with us often sufficiently annoying at the 

 close of summer, so as to have led the celebrated Italian Ugo Foscolo, 

 when residing here, to call it one of his three "miseries of life." 2 But 

 we know nothing of it as a tormentor compared with the inhabitants of 

 southern Europe. " I met (says Arthur Young in his interesting Travels 

 through France), between Pradelles and Thuytz, mulberries and flies at the 

 same time ; by the term flies I mean those myriads of them which form 

 the most disagreeable circumstance of the southern climates. They are 

 the first torments in Spain, Italy, and the Olive district of France : it is 

 not that they bite, sting, or hurt, but they buzz, tease, and worry ; your 

 mouth, eyes, ears, and nose, are full of them ; they swarm on every eatable, 

 fruit, sugar, milk, everything is attacked by them in such myriads, that 

 if they are not incessantly driven away by a person who has nothing else 

 to do, to eat a meal is impossible. They are, however, caught on pre- 

 pared paper and other contrivances with so much ease and in such quan- 

 tities, that, were it not from negligence, they could not abound in such 

 incredible quantities. If I farmed in these countries, I think I should 

 manure four or five acres every year with dead flies. I have been much 

 surprised that the late learned Mr. Harmer should think it odd to find, 

 by writers who treated of southern climates, that driving away flies was an 

 object of importance. Had he been with me in Spain and in Languedoc 

 in July and August, he would have been very far from thinking there was 

 anything odd in it." 1 



1 Loch. Lapp. i. 208, 209. Fl. Lapp. 382, 383. It appears, however, from other 

 authors, that they do bite. 



2 Annual Obituary, 1828, p. 393. 



5 Young's Travels in France, i. 298. These flies are equally troublesome and 

 tormenting in Sweden (see Amcen. Acad. iii. 343.), and also in the United States, 

 where Mr. Stewart and Capt. Marryat make frequent and grievous complaints of 

 them, the latter asserting that in some places they were fifty to the square inch, 

 as I believe they literally were in a small inn where we took breakfast in September, 

 1830, on our road to Chamouni from Geneva. 



It is a remarkable, and, as yet, unexplained fact, that if nets of thread or string 

 with meshes a full inch square, be stretched over the open windows of a room in 

 summer or autumn, when flies are the greatest nuisance, not a single one will ven- 

 ture to enter from without ; so that by this simple plan a house may be kept free from 

 these pests, while the adjoining ones which have not had nets applied to their win- 

 dows, will swarm with them. In order, however, that the protection should be effi- 

 cient, it is necessary that the rooms to which it is applied should have the light enter 

 by one side only ; for in those which have a thorough light the flies pass through the 

 meshes without scruple. For a fuller account of these singular facts, the reader is 

 referred to a paper by "W. Spence in Trans. Ent. Soc. Lond. vol. i. p. 1., and also to 

 one in the same work, vol. ii. p. 45. by the Rev. E. Stanley (subsequently Bishop of 

 ^Norwich), who having made some of the experiments suggested by Mr. Speiice, 



