DIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 57 
high as his shoulders ; and, dropping the creature, he observed six marks 
upon his hand where the six feet had stood.* 
You may now possibly think that I have nearly gone through the cata- 
logue of our personal assailants of the insect tribes. If such, however, is 
your expectation, I fear you will be disappointed, since I have many more, 
‘ind some tremendous ones, to enumerate : but as a small compensation 
for such a detail of evils and injuries to which our species is exposed from 
foes seemingly so insignificant, and of acts of rebellion of the vilest and 
most despised of our subjects against our boasted supremacy, the objects 
to which I shall next call your attention are not, like most of our apterous 
enemies, calculated to excite disgust and nausea when we see them or 
speak of them; nor do they usually steal upon us during the silent how's 
of repose (though I must except here the gnat or mosquito), but are many 
of them very beautiful, and boldly make their attack upon us in open day, 
when we are best able to defend ourselves. Borne on rapid wings, 
wherever they find us, they endeayour to lay us under contribution, and 
the tribute they exact is our blood. Wonderful and various are the 
weapons that enable them to enforce their demand. What would you 
think of any large animal that should come to attack you with a tremen- 
dous apparatus of knives and lancets issuing from its mouth? Yet such 
are the instruments by means of which the fire-eyed and blood-thirsty 
—-horse-fly (Labanus L.) makes an incision in your flesh ; and then, forming a 
siphon of them, often carries off many drops of your blood.* The pain 
they inflict, when they open a vein, is usuatly very acute. A fly of this 
kind not only occasioned Mr. Sheppard considerable pain by its bite, 
but also produced swelling and blackness round one eye ; and the flesh of 
his cheek and chin was so,enlarged from it as to hang down. And 
Mr. W. S. MacLeay thus describes to me the annoyance he suffered from 
one of them. “ I went down the other day to the country, and was fairly 
driven out of it by the Hematopota pluvialis, which attacked me with such — 
fury, that although I did not at last venture beyond the door without a 
veil, my face and hands were swelled to that degree as to be scarcely yet 
recovered from the effects of their venom. I was obliged, on my return to 
town, to stay two days at home. Whenever this insect bites me it has 
this effect, and I have never been able to discover any remedy for the 
torture it puts me to.” In this country, however, the attacks of these 
flies are usually not frequent enough to make them more than a minor 
“misery of human life;” but the burning-fly (brélod) or sand-fly of Ame-— 
rica’ and the West Indies, which seem to be the same insect, causes @ 
much more intolerable anguish, which has been compared to what a red- 
hot needle or a spark of fire would occasion us to endure. Lambert, in 
1 Two similar instances of effects on the human system, resembling electric 
shocks, produced by insects, have been communicated to the Entomological Society 
by Mr. Yarrell; one, mentioned in a letter from Lady de Grey, of Groby, in which 
the shock was caused by a beetle, one of the common Liateride, and extended from 
the hand to the elbow on suddenly touching the insect; the other caused by a large 
hairy lepidopterous caterpillar, picked up in South America by Capt. Blakeney, R.N., 
who felt on touching it a sensation extending up his arm, similar to an electric 
shock, of such force that he lost the use of the arm for a time, and his life was even 
vi wet danger by his medical attendant. (Zrans, Lint. Soc, Lond, iii, proc. 
Vili, XXili. 
2 One took eight drops from Reaumur, iy. 250, 
% Bartram’s Travels, 383. 
