113 



LETTER V. 



INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 

 INDIRECT INJURIES. 



Having detailed to you the direct injuries which we suffer from insects, I 

 am now to call your attention to their indirect attacks upon us, or the 

 injury which they do our property ; and under this view also you will own, 

 with the fullest conviction, that they are not beings that can with prudence 

 or safety be disregarded or despised. Our property, at least that part 

 exposed to the annoyance of these creatures, may be regarded as consist- 

 ing of animal and vegetable productions, and that in two states ; when 

 they are living, namely, and after they are dead. I shall therefore en- 

 deavor to give you a sketch of the mischief which they occasion, first to 

 our living animal property, then to our living vegetable property ; and, 

 lastly, to our dead stock, whether animal or vegetable. 



Next to our own persons, the animals which we employ in our business 

 or pleasures, or fatten for food, individually considered, are the most valua- 

 ble part of our possessions — and at certain seasons, hosts of insects of 

 various kinds are incessant in their assaults upon most of them. — To begin 

 with that noble animal the horse. See him, when turned out to his pas- 

 ture, unable to touch a morsel of the food he has earned by his labors. 

 He flies to the shade, evidently in great uneasiness, where he stands con- 

 tinually stamping from the pain produced by the insertion of the weapons 

 sheathed in the proboscis of a little fly (^Stomoxys calcitrans) before no- 

 ticed as attacking ourselves.^ This alights upon him sometimes in one 

 place and sometimes in another, and never lets him rest while the day 

 lasts. See him again when in harness and traveling. He is bathed in 

 blood flowing from innumerable wounds made by the knives and lancets 

 of various horse-flies {Tahanus L.), which assail him as he goes, and 

 allow him no respite^ ; and consider that even this is nothing to what he 

 suffers in other climates from the same pest. In North America, vast 

 clouds of different species — so abundant as to obscure every distant object, 

 and so severe in their bite as to merit the appellation of burning flies — 

 cover and torment the horses to such a degree as to excite compassion 

 even in the hearts of the pack-horsemen. Some of them are nearly as 

 big as humble-bees ; and, when they pierce the skin and veins of the 

 unhappy beast, make so large an orifice that, besides what they suck, the 

 blood flows down its neck, sides, and shoulders in large drops like tears, 

 till, to use Bartram's expression, " they are all in a gore of blood." Both 

 the dog-tick and the American tick before mentioned, especially the latter, 



' See above, p. 94. 



2 Once traveling through Cambridgeshire with a brother entomologist in a gig, our horse 

 was in the conditioa here described, from the attack of Tahanus ruiticus. 



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