556 THE ECONOMIC STATUS OF INSECTS AS A CLASS. 



patient in enormous numbers. A rough estimate showed 7,000,000 

 eggs and 2,000,000 mites. 



Those of us who live in a reasonably civilized way are confined, in 

 our experience of annoying insects, largely to the forms mentioned in 

 our opening paragraph, namely, mosquitoes and house flies and rarely 

 fleas; but a glance through the medical literature reveals the existence 

 of more or less frequent o,ases of such a nature that they are little less 

 than horrible. Prominent among these are the cases of so-called 

 Myasis, and especially those resulting from the attacks of the screw 

 worm fly, Gompsomyia macellaria. 



Eesidents of temperate regions are fortunate as compared with those 

 of tropical regions in respect to the personally annoying insects. Our 

 troubles from these individually insignificant causes are intensified to 

 a degree in warmer countries, where the comfort of the individual 

 absolutely depends upon the adoption of measures, always difficult 

 and frequently impracticable, to exclude insects from his person and 

 from his food. This is so well known in these days of numerous books 

 of travel that I will close this aspect of our question simply with a 

 quotation from a poet of the Indies, written many years ago: 



"On every dish the booming beetle falls, 

 The cockroach plays, or caterpillar crawls ; 

 A thousand shapes of variegated hues 

 Parade the table and inspect the stews. 

 To living walls the swarming hundreds stick, 

 Or court, a dainty meal, the oily wick ; 

 Heaps over heaps their slimy bodies drench. 

 Out go the lamps with suffocating stench. 

 When hideous insects every plate defile. 

 The laugh how empty, and how forced the smile!" 



AS CARRIERS OF DISEASE. 



Manson's demonstrated transmission of the filaria diseases of the 

 East (elephantiasis, chyluria, and lymph scrotum) by insects; the dis- 

 covery by Salmon and Smith of the carriage of the germ of Texas 

 fever by the well-known Southern cattle tick ; the discovery by Bruce 

 of the fact that the Tsetse fly of Africa is so destructive to animals, 

 not by its bite alone, but by carrying into the circulation of the animal 

 that it attacks the micro-organisms of disease; the demonstration by 

 Howe and others of the previously suspected fact that the purulent 

 conjunctivitis of the Egyptians is spread by the house fly: the partly 

 proven hypothesis of Manson and Grassi of the relation existing 

 between mosquitoes and malaria; the circumstantially proven carriage 

 of the germs of Asiatic cholera and typhoid fever by flies; the demon- 

 stration claimed by Finlay of the carriage of a mild type of yellow 

 fever by mosquitoes; the suggestion by Hubbard that the "pink eye" 

 of the South is spread by Hippelates; the well-recognized fact among 

 the Europeans of the Fiji Islands that without a veil a serious native 



