78 
LETTER V. 
INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 
INDIRECT INJURIES, 
Havine detailed to you the direct injuries which we suffer from insects, 
Tam now to call your attention to their indirect attacks upon us, or the 
injury which they do our property ; and under this view also you will own, 
with the fullest conviction, that they are not beings that can with prudence or 
safety be disregarded or despised. Our property, at least that partexposed to 
the annoyance of these creatures, may be regarded as consisting of animal 
and vegetable pa cat and that in two states; when they are living, 
| namely, and after they are dead. I shall therefore endeavour to give 
/ you a sketch of the mischief which they occasion, first to our living animal 
| property, then to our living vegetable property ; and, lastly, to our dead 
stock, whether animal or vegetable. 
Next to our own persons, the animals which we employ in our business 
or pleasures, or fatten for food, individually considered, are the most yalu- 
able part of our possessions — and at certain seasons, hosts of insects of 
various kinds are incessant in their assaults upon most of them.—To begin 
\. with that noble animal the horse. See him, when turned out to his pasture, 
unable to touch a morsel of the food he has earned by his labours, He 
flies to the shade, evidently in great uneasiness, where he stands continually 
stamping from the pain produced by the insertion of the weapons sheathed 
in the proboscis of a little fly (Stomowys calcitrans) before noticed as attack= 
ing ourselves.' This alights upon him sometimes in one place and some- 
times in another, and never lets bim rest while the day lasts. See him 
again when in harness and travelling. He is bathed in blood flowing from 
innumerable wounds made by the knives and lancets of various horse-flies 
~ (Tabanus L.), which assail him as he goes, and allow him no respite? ; 
and consider that even this is nothing to what he suffers in other climates 
from the same pest. In North America, vast clouds of different species— 
so abundant as to obscure every distant object, and so severe in their bite 
as to merit the appellation of burning flies —cover and torment the horses 
to such a degree as to excite compassion even in the hearts of the pack- 
horsemen. Some of them are nearly as big as humble-bees; and, when they 
pierce the skin and veins of the unhappy beast, make so large an orifice 
that, besides what they suck, the blood flows down its neck, sides, and 
shoulders in large drops like tears, till, to use Bartram’s expression, “ the 
_ are all in a gore of blood.’ Both the dog-tick and the American tic 
before mentioned, especially the latter, also infest the horse. _Kalm affirms, 
that he has seen the under parts of the belly, and other places of the body, 
1 See above, p. 25, 
.? Once travelling through Cambridgeshire with a brother entomologist in a 
gig, our horse was in the condition here described, from the attack of Tabanus 
Tus 
