68 DIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 
— another gnat (Simulium replans), which, as Linné informs us, who mise 
named it a Culex, is so incredibly numerous in Lapland, as entirely to 
cover a man’s body, turning a white dress into a black one, occupying 
the whole atmosphere, filling the mouth, nostrils, eyes, and ears of tra- 
vellers, and thus preventing respiration, and almost choking them. ‘These 
little animals, he says, do not bite, but torture incessantly by their titilla- 
tion..—In New South Wales a small ant was observed by Sir Joseph 
Banks, inhabiting the roots of a plant, which when disturbed rushed out 
by myriads, and running over the uncovered parts of the body, produced a 
sensation of this kind that was worse than pain. 
The common house-fly is with us often sufficiently annoying at the 
close of summer, so as to have led the celebrated Italian Ugo Foscolo, 
when residing here, to call it one of his three “miseries of life’? But 
we know nothing of it as a tormentor compared with the inhabitants of 
southern Europe.—‘ I met (says Arthur Young in his interesting Travels 
through France), between Pradelles and Thuytz, mulberries and flies at the 
same time; by the term jfies |! mean those myriads of them which form 
the most disagreeable circumstance of the southern climates, They are 
the first torments in Spain, Italy, and the Olive district of France: it is 
not that they bite, sting, or hurt, but they buzz, tease, and worry ; your 
mouth, eyes, ears, and nose, are full of them; they swarm on every eatable, 
—fruit, sugar, milk, everything is attacked by them in such myriads, that 
if they are not incessantly driven away by a person who has nothing else 
to do, to eat a meal is impossible. They are, however, caught on pre- 
pared paper and other contrivances with so much ease and in such quan- 
tities, that, were it not from negligence, they could not abound in such 
incredible quantities. If I farmed in these countries, I think I should 
manure four or five acres every year with dead flies. —I have been much 
surprised that the late learned Mr. Harmer should think it odd to find, 
by writers who treated of southern climates, that driving away flies was an 
object of importance. Had he been with me in Spain and in Languedoc 
in July and August, he would have been very far from thinking there was 
anything odd in it,” 
1 Lach. Lapp. i. 208, 209. Fl. Lapp. 882, 383. It appears, however, from other 
authors, that they do bite. 
2 Annual Obituary, 1828, p. 893. 
3 Young’s Travels in F’yance, i. 298. These flies are equally troublesome and 
tormenting in Sweden (see Amen. Acad. iii, 843.), and also in the United States, 
where Mr. Stewart and Capt. Marryat make frequent and grievous complaints of 
them, the latter asserting that in some places they were fifty to the square inch, 
as I believe they literally were in a small inn where we took breakfast in September, 
1830, on our road to Chamouni from Geneva. 
It is a remarkable, and, as yet, unexplained fact, that if nets of thread or string 
with meshes a full inch square, be stretched over the open windows of a room in 
summer or autumn, when flies are the greatest nuisance, not a single one will ven- 
ture to enter from without; so that by this simple plan a house may be kept free from 
these pests, while the adjoining ones which have not had nets applied to their win- 
dows, will swarm with them. In order, however, that the protection should be efli- 
cient, it is necessary that the rooms to which it is applied should have the light enter 
by one side only; forin those which have a thorough light the flies pass through the 
meshes without scruple. For a fuller account of these singular facts, the reader is 
referred to a paper by W. Spence in Zrans. Ent. Soc. Lond, vol. i. p.1., and also to 
one in the same work, vol. ii. p. 45. by the Rey. W. Stanley (subsequently Bishop of 
Norwich), who haying made some of the experiments suggested by hn, Spence, 
