MUSCIDiE — FLIES. 287 



Muscidae — Flies. 



Among the instances recorded of Flies arpearing in im- 

 mense numbers, the following are the most remarkable : 



" AVhen the Creole frigate was lying in the outer roads 

 of Buenos Ayres, in 1819, at a distance of six miles from 

 the land, her decks and rigging were suddenly covered with 

 thousands of Flies and grains of sand. The sides of tlie 

 vessel had just received a fresh coat of paint, to which the 

 insects adhered in- such numbers as to spot and disfigure 

 the vessel, and to render it necessary partially to renew the 

 paint. Capt. W. H. Smyth was obliged to repaint his ves- 

 sel, the Adventure, in the Mediterranean, from the same 

 cause. He was on his way from Malta to Tripoli, when a 

 southern wind blowing from the coast of Africa, then one 

 hundred miles distant, drove such myriads of Flies upon the 

 fresh paint that not the smallest point was left unoccupied 

 by the insects."^ 



" In May, 1699, at Kerton," records Mrs. Thoresby, p. 15, 

 " in Lincolnshire, the sky seemed to darken north-westward 

 at a little distance from the town, as though it had been a 

 shower of hailstones or snow; but when it came near the 

 town, it appeared to be a prodigious swarm of Flies, which 

 went with such a force toward the south-east that persons 

 were forced to turn their backs of them,"^ 



On the morning of the ITth of September, 1831, a small 

 dipterous iusectj.. belonging to Meigen's genus Chlorops, 

 and nearly allied to, if not identical with, his G. laeta, ap- 

 peared suddenly, and in such immense quantities, in one of 

 the upper rooms of the Provost's Lodge, in King's College, 

 Cambridge, that the greater part of the ceiling toward the 

 window of the room was so thickly covered as not to be 

 visible. They entered by a window looking due north, 

 while the wind was blowing steadily N. N. W. So it ap- 

 pears they came from the direction of the River Cam, or 

 rather came with its current.^ 



In the summer of 1834, which season was remarkable in 

 England for its swarms and shoals of insects, the air was 



1 Lyell's Princ. of Geol, p. 6oG . 



2 Southey's Com. Place Bk , 1st S. p. 507. 



3 Mag. of Nat. Hist . v. 302. 



