DIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. (b) 
skin of the abdomen six months, penetrating deeper, if it be disturbed, and 
becoming so dangerous as sometimes to occasion death, The imago he 
describes as being of a brown colour, and about the size of the common 
house-fly ; so that it is a small species compared with the rest of the 
genus.! Even the gad-fly of the ox, leaving its proper food, has been 
known to oviposit in the jaw of a woman, and the bots produced from 
the eggs finally caused her death.? Other flies also of various kinds thas 
penetrate into us, either preying upon our flesh, or getting into our intes- 
tines. Leeuwenhoek mentions the case of a woman whose leg had been 
enlarging with glandular bodies for some years. Her surgeon gave him 
one that he had cut from it, in which were many small maggots: these he 
fed with flesh till they assumed the pupa, when they produced a fly as 
large as the flesh-fly.3—A patient of Dr. Reeve of Norwich, after suffering 
for some time great pain, was at last relieved by voiding a considerable 
number of maggots, which agree precisely with those described by De 
Geer as the larve of his Musca domestica minor (Anthomyia canicularis — 
Meig.), a fly which he speaks of as very common in apartments.*— In _ 
Paraguay the flesh-flies are said to be uncommonly numerous and noxious. 
Azara relates® that, after a storm, when the heat was excessive, he was 
assailed by such an army of them, that in less than half an hour his clothes 
were quite white with their eggs, so that he was forced to scrape them off 
with a knife; adding, that he has known instances of persons, who, after 
having bled at the nose in their sleep, were attacked by the most violent 
headaches ; when at length several great maggots, the offspring of these 
flies, issuing from their nostrils, gave them relief—In Jamaica a large blue 
fly buzzes about the sick in the last stages of fever; and when they sleep 
or doze with their mouths open, the nurses find it very difficult to prevent 
these flies from laying their eggs in the nose, mouth, or gums. An instance 
is recorded of a lady, who, after recovering from a fever, fell a victim to 
the maggots of this fly, which from the nose found their way through the 
os cribriforme into the cavity of the skull, and afterwards into the brain. 
One of the most shocking cases of Scholechiasis I ever met with is related 
in Bell's Weekly Messenger in the following words: “On Thursday 
June 25. died at Asbornby (Lincolnshire), John Page, a pauper belonging 
1 For an investigation of the question, whether man is attacked by a distinct 
species of Q@strus, see a report on the statements of M.M. Roulin, Howship, 
Say, Guerin, &c., made to l’Académie des Sciences, 1833, by MM. Isidore, 
Geoffroy Saint Hilaire, and Dumeril (copied in Ann. Soc. Ent. de France, ii. 
518,), who, on the whole, though with some hesitation, pronounce for the aflirm- 
ative, Yet most of the facts passed in review seem rather to support the idea 
that species of G2stras, whose proper abode is in other animals, occasionally attack 
man, 
2 Clark, in Linn. Trans. iii. 823. note. 
5 Leeuw. Zpist. Oct. 17. 1687, ubi supra. De Geer, vi. 26, 27. 
4 Edin, Med. and Surg. Journ. 5 p, 216. 
® Lempriere, On the Diseases of the Army in Jamaica, ii. 182. See Trans, Ent. 
Soc. Lond. i, proc. xlvi. in which various cases are recorded by W. Sells, Esq. (an 
acute observer, whose untimely death Lntomology has recently had to deplore), as 
coming: under his own observation in Jamaica, of flies being hatched in the human 
body ; in one instance, in a neglected blister on the chest; in another, in the gums 
and inside of the cheek; in a third, in the ear; and in a fourth, in the passages of 
the nostrils, out of which the negro who was the sufferer counted not fewer than 235 
larvin (of, Mr. Sells believes, the blue-bottle-fly), which in a fortnight dropped out by 
applications of oil and tobacco smoke. 
