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58 DIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 
his Travels through Canada, &c. says, “ They are so very small as to be 
hardly perceptible in their attacks; and your forehead will be streaming 
with blood before you are sensible of being amongst them!;”—and Cap- 
tain Back, in his Journey to the Arctic Sea (p. 117.), speaking of the 
misery occasioned by these little tormentors, the dré/ots (including also 
mosquitos), observes, “There is certainly no form of wretchedness 
among those to which the chequered life of a Voyageur is exposed, at once 
so great and so humiliating, as the torture inflicted by these puny blood- 
suckers. To avoid them is impossible. At last, subdued by pain and 
fatigue, he throws himself in despair with his face to the earth, and half 
suffocated in his blanket, groans away a few hours of sleepless rest.” We 
have one species (Sfomowys calcilrans), alluded to in a former letter, as so 
nearly resembling the common house-fly, which, though its oral instru- 
ments are to appearance not near so tremendous, is a much greater tor- 
ment than the horse-fly. This little pest, I speak feelingly, incessantly 
interrupts our studies and comfort in showery weather, making us even 
stamp like the cattle by its attacks on our legs; and, if we drive it away 
ever so often, returning again and again to the charge. In Canada they 
are infinitely worse. ‘I have sat down to write,” says Lambert (who 
though he calls it the house-fly, is evidently speaking of the Stomoxys), 
“and have been obliged to throw away my pen in consequence of their 
irritating bite, which has obliged me every moment to raise my hand to 
my eyes, nose, mouth, and ears in constant succession. When I could no 
longer write, I began to read, and was always obliged to keep one hand 
constantly on the move towards my head. Sometimes in the course of a 
few minutes I would take half a dozen of my tormentors from my lips, 
between which I caught them just as they perched.”? 
The swallow-fly (Craterina Hirundinis*), whose natural food is the bird 
after which it is named, has been known to make its repast on the human 
species. One found its way into a bed of the Rev. R. Sheppard, where it 
first, for several nights, sorely annoyed a friend of his, and afterwards 
himself, without their suspecting the culprit. After a close search, how- 
ever, it was discovered in the form of this fly, which, forsaking the nest of 
the swallow, had by some chance taken its station between the sheets, 
and thus glutted itself with the blood of man.— In travelling between 
Edam and Purmerend in North Holland (July 21. 1815), in an open 
vehicle, I was much teased by another bird-fly (Ornithomyia avicularia) 
(two individuals of which I caught) alighting on my head, and inserting its 
rostrum into my flesh,—Mr. Sheppard remarks, as a reason for this dere- 
liction of their appropriate food, that no sooner does life depart from the 
bird that these flies infest than they immediately desert it and take flight, 
alighting upon the first living creature that they meet with; which if it be 
not a bird they soon quit, but, as it should seem from the above facts, 
not before they have made a trial how it will suit them as food. 
But of all the insect-tormentors of man, none are so loudly and uni- 
versally complained of as the species of the genus Culex L., whether known 
by the name of gnats or mosquitos.* Pliny, after Aristotle, distinguishes 
1 j, 127. The West India sand-fly was noticed by the late Robinson Kittoe, Esq. 
who however did not recollect their fetching blood. 
2 Travels, &c. i. 126. 5 See Curtis’s Brit. Znt. t. 122. 
4 It has been generally supposed by naturalists, that the Mosquitos of America 
belong to the Linnean genus Culex; but the celebrated traveller Humboldt asserts 
