58 DIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 



his Travels through Canada, &c. says, " They are so very small as to be 

 hardly perceptible in their attacks ; and your forehead will be streaming 

 with blood before you are sensible of being amongst them 1 ;" and Cap- 

 tain Back, in his Journey to the Arctic Sea (p. 117.), speaking of the 

 misery occasioned by these little tormentors, the brulots (including also 

 mosquitos), observes, " There is certainly no form of wretchedness 

 among those to which the chequered life of a Voyageur is exposed, at once 

 so great and so humiliating, as the torture inflicted by these puny blood- 

 suckers. To avoid them is impossible. At last, subdued by pain and 

 fatigue, he throws himself in despair with his face to the earth, and half 

 suffocated in his blanket, groans away a few hours of sleepless rest." We 

 have one species (Stomoxys calcitrans), alluded to in a former letter, as so 

 nearly resembling the common house-fly, which, though its oral instru- 

 ments are to appearance not near so tremendous, is a much greater tor- 

 ment than the horse-fly. This little pest, I speak feelingly, incessantly 

 interrupts our studies and comfort in showery weather, making us even 

 stamp like the cattle by its attacks on our legs; and, if we drive it away 

 ever so often, returning again and again to the charge. In Canada they 

 are infinitely worse. " I have sat down to write," says Lambert (who 

 though he calls it the house-fly, is evidently speaking of the Stomoxys), 

 " and have been obliged to throw away my pen in consequence of their 

 irritating bite, which has obliged me every* moment to raise my hand to 

 my eyes, nose, mouth, and ears in constant succession. When I could no 

 longer write, I began to read, and was always obliged to keep one hand 

 constantly on the move towards my head. Sometimes in the course of a 

 few minutes I would take half a dozen of my tormentors from my lips, 

 between which I caught them just as they perched." 2 



The swallow-fly (Craterina Hirundinis 3 ), whose natural food is the bird 

 after which it is named, has been known to make its repast on the human 

 species. One found its way into a bed of the Rev. R. Sheppard, where it 

 first, for several nights, sorely annoyed a friend of his, and afterwards 

 himself, without their suspecting the culprit. After a close search, how- 

 ever, it was discovered in the form of this fly, which, forsaking the nest of 

 the swallow, had by some chance taken its station between the sheets, 

 and thus glutted itself with the blood of man. In travelling between 

 Edam and Purmerend in North Holland (July 21. 1815), in an open 

 vehicle, I was much teased by another bird-fly (Ornithomyia avicularia) 

 (two individuals of which I caught) alighting on" my head, and inserting its 

 rostrum into my flesh. Mr. Sheppard remarks, as a reason for this dere- 

 liction of their appropriate food, that no sooner does life depart from the 

 bird that these flies infest than they immediately desert it and take flight, 

 alighting upon the first living creature that they meet with ; which if it be 

 not a bird they soon quit, but, as it should seem from the above facts, 

 not before they have made a trial how it will suit them as food. 



But of all the insect-tormentors of man, none are so loudly and uni- 

 versally complained of as the species of the genus Culex L., whether known 

 by the name of gnats or mosquitos. 4 Pliny, after Aristotle, distinguishes 



1 i. 127. The West India sand-fly was noticed by the late Robinson Kittoe, Esq., 

 who however did not recollect their fetching blood. 



2 Travels, &c. i. 126. s See Curtis's Brit. Ent. 1. 122. 



4 It has been generally supposed by naturalists, that the Mosquitos of America 

 belong to the Linnean genus Culex ; but the celebrated traveller Humboldt asserts 



