98 Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society Vol.X 



This last word is a guess, except that it is an insect. Is it the 

 earliest mention in the world of a mosquito ? 



For one insect there can be no error, although in this dateless 

 age one may not discriminate between a thousand species of 

 Muscidse, Syrphidae, and many other Diptera. An annual festival 

 was set apart for the flies. Little dishes were set outside the 

 houses, containing flour and that which has been translated as 

 " sugar " but which probably means cane or some other sweet 

 matter. If the Greeks did not have sugar it was probably un- 

 known to the people of Sanscrit. 



The Sanscrit word here employed is indksika, a feminine form 

 from mdksa, fly. The Zend transposes the k and s, mashki. 

 This is beyond any doubt the Latin musca. It is less certainly 

 the Greek muia. It is hardly the Persian inaka or myci, which 

 fathers the word for ants. 



The confusion of the Turan tribes of maka, or myci, or vari- 

 ous spellings arises from the vague translations of Sir Henry 

 Rawlinson. The 'iiiike appears again as the Myrmidons, and are 

 the ants. They were a tribe of Turan. The word myrme^r is 

 merely muria plus mike, i. e., the ants occurring in 10,000 colonies. 

 You remember that when Achilles, son of Peleus and Thetis, 

 both demigods, appeared with the Greek forces before Troy, his 

 army, coming from Macedonia was of Myrmidons. The poet 

 declares that the war against Troy was over Helen, wife of a 

 Greek king, who eloped with Paris, son of the king of Troy. 

 But the cruel science of chronology steps in to assert that when 

 Paris was 21 years old Helen was anywhere from 90 to no. 

 Such elopements might have happened, but — . The truth of the 

 matter is that the Trojan war, which occurred nearer 1325 B. C. 

 than 1 100, the two dates being those of extremes of conjecture, 

 was merely a single campaign in the ten thousand years of war- 

 fare between Iran and Turan. 



A thousand years later Alexander, King of Macedon, claimed 

 for himself and his people admittance to the great games open 

 to all freeborn Greeks asserting that he was a lineal descendant 

 of Achilles. The Myrmidons, ancestors of the Macedonian race, 

 came, it was claimed, from the island of ^gina, hard by Athens. 

 The island having become depopulated, the gods gave permission 



