140 DIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 



dibles. Upon wetting my fingers more than once, to take 

 it up when it had fallen from a table upon which it was 

 placed, the saline taste Avith which it was imbued was so 

 powerful that it was some time before it was dissipated 

 from my mouth. — I shall only mention one more instance, 

 because it is a singular one. The larva of Elophilus pen- 

 dulus, F., a fly peculiarly formed by nature for inhabiting 

 fluids, has been found in the stomach of a woman*. 



You will smile when I tell you that I have met with the 

 prescription of a famous urine-doctor, in which he recom- 

 mends to his credulous patient to take a certain number 

 of sow bugs per diem, by this name distinguishing, as I 

 suppose, Ofiiscus Armadillo, L., once a very favourite re- 

 medy. What effect they produced in this case I was not 

 informed; but the learned Bonnet relates that he had 

 seen a certificate of an English physician, dated July 1 763, 

 stating that, some time before, a young woman who had 

 swallowed these animals alive, as is usually done, threw 

 up a prodigious number of them of all sizes, which must 

 have bred in her stomach b . — Another apterous species 

 appears to have been detected in a still more remarkable 

 situation. Hermann, the author of the admirable Me- 

 moire Apterologique, whose untimely death is so much to 

 be lamented, informs us that an Acarus figured and de- 

 scribed in his work (A. marginatus, H.) was observed 

 by his artist running on the corpus callosum of the brain 

 of a patient in the military hospital at Strasbourg, which 

 had been opened but a minute before and the two hemi- 

 spheres and the pia mater just separated. He adds that 

 this is not the first time that insects have been found in 



* Fhilos, Mag. ix. 366. * Konnet, v. 144,, 



