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CERTAIN PARASITIC INSECTS. 
BY A. 8. PACKARD, JR. 
Tue subject of our discourse is not only a disagreeable 
but too often a painful one. Not only is the mere mention 
of the creature’s name of which we are to speak tabooed and 
avoided by the refined and polite, but the creature itself has 
become extinct and banished from the society of the good 
and respectable. Indeed under such happy auspices do a 
large proportion of the civilized now live that their knowl- 
edge of the habits and form of the louse may be represented 
by a blank. Not so with some of their great-great-grand- 
fathers and grandmothers if history, sacred and profane, po- 
etry, and the annals of literature testify aright ; for it is com- 
paratively a recent fact in history that the louse has awakened 
to find himself an outcast and an alien. Among savage na- 
tions of all climes, some of which have been dignified with 
the apt, though high sounding name of Phthiriophagi, and 
among the Chinese and other semi-civilized peoples, these 
lords of the soil still flourish with a luxuriance and rankness 
of growth that never diminishes, so that we may say without 
exaggeration that certain mental traits and fleshly appetites 
induced by their consumption as an article of food may have 
been created, while a separate niche in our anthropological 
museums is reserved for the instruments of warfare, both 
offensive and defensive, used by their phthiriophagous hun- 
ters. Then have we not in the very centres of civilization 
the poor and degraded, which are most faithfully attended 
by these revolting satellites ! 
But bantering aside, there is no more engaging subject 
to the naturalist than that of animal parasites. Consider 
the great proportion of animals that gain their livelihood 
by stealing that of others. While a large proportion of 
plants are more or less parasitic, they gain thereby in 
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