48 
forty which hatched ina cardboard box molted therein to an eight- 
legged form without having partaken of food. The other stages, to 
draw conclusions from observations on captured specimens afterwards 
fed on a fowl or goat, attach themselves by night or day to the host 
and gorge themselves to repletion in from one-half hour to two hours. 
They then crawl away and hide. The females alternate egg laying 
with feasting. The tampan is widely distributed in South Africa, and 
in some sections is a sore trial to travelers. 
THE FOWL TICK. 
The fowl tick of South Africa has been identified by Professor 
Neumann as the historic Argas persicus. It is a flattened, ovate crea- 
ture, with a peculiarly stippled dorsal surface. It measures about 
two-fifths of an inch when full grown. Poultry, geese, and ducks are 
commonly afflicted with it, and death from loss of blood sometimes 
follows severe attacks, particularly in the case of young birds. Man 
is sometimes attacked. 
This tick molts its skin three times before becoming adult. The 
egos are laid loosely in crevices. The hexapod larva crawls to a host, 
affixes itself, and remains attached nearly a week. The body mean- 
while distends with blood, and, toward the last, undergoes a change of 
form which gives it the general appearance of the later stages. When 
fully engorged, the larva crawls off and secretes itself in some crevice 
or under the bark of a tree preparatory to molting. In its later stages 
the tick normally visits its host in darkness, remains but an hour or 
two, and during this short time distends its body fully. One visit 
only intervenes with a molting. The adult male enlarges but little. 
The adult female increases all its dimensions with its first feast after 
the final molt, and later appears to simply fill itself out to the size 
then attained. It alternates feeding with egg laying. A score or 
more of specimens under observation and fed on a caged fowl have 
thus alternated feasting with oviposition four times. Intercourse 
between the sexes has only thrice been observed. In all three cases 
the male had his rostrum inserted into the female. Large numbers of 
both sexes have been fed and kept boxed in company, and as only the 
three pairs have been seen together, some observations of importance 
probably remain to be made. Less than three weeks need intervene 
between the feastings of the nymphic stages and a month those of the 
adults. 
The vitality of the fowl tick is remarkable. It resists insecticides, 
even hydrocyanic-acid gas, far more than the bedbug or other prover- 
bially hard-to-kill pests. The larvee may be soon starved to death, but 
the later stages live on through months of fasting and succumb only 
when shriveled to a dry shell. Several have remained alive over a. 
year in cardboard boxes on my office desk, 
