DIRECT BENEFITS DERIVED FROM INSECTS. 179 
favour ; and even doubt the efficacy of a more modern specific for tooth- 
ache, promulgated by a learned Italian professor }, who assures us that a 
finger once imbued with the juices of Rhinobatus antiodontalgicus (a name 
enough to give one the toothache to pronounce it) will retain its power 
of curing this disease for a twelyemonth! I must content myself, there- 
fore, with expatiating on the virtues of the very few insects to which the 
sons of Hippocrates and Galen now deign to have recourse. At the 
same time I cannot help observing that their proscription of the remainder 
may have been too indiscriminate. Mankind are apt to run from one 
extreme to the other. From having ascribed too much efficacy to insect~ 
remedies, we may now ascribe too little. Many insects emit very powerful 
odours, and some produce extraordinary effects upon the human frame ; 
and it is an idea not altogether to be rejected, that they may concentrate 
into a smaller compass the properties and virtues of the plants upon which 
they feed, and thus afford medicines more powerful in operation than the 
plants themselves. It is at least worth while to institute a set of expe- 
riments with this view. 
Medicine at the present day is indebted to an ant (Formica bispinosa 
Oliv., fungosa F.) for a kind of lint collected by that insect from the 
Bombax or silk cotton-tree, which as a styptic is preferable to the puff-ball, 
and at Cayenne is successfully used to stop the blood in the most violent 
hemorrhages* ; and gum ammoniae, according to Mr. Jackson’, oozes out 
of a plant like fennel, from incisions made in the bark by a beetle with a 
large horn, But, with these exceptions (in which the remedy is rather 
collected than produced by insects), and that of spiders’ webs, which are 
said to have been recently administered with success in ague, the only 
insects which directly supply us with medicine are some species of Can-— 
tharis and Mylabris. These beetles however amply make up in efficacy 
for their numerical insignificance; and almost any article could be better 
spared from the Materia Medica than one of the former usually known 
under the name of Cantharides, which is not only of incalculable importance 
as a yesicatory, but is now administered internally in many cases with very 
good effect. In Europe, the insect chiefly used with this view is the Can- 
tharis vesicatoria*; but in America the C. cinerea and vittata (which are ex- 
tremely common and noxious insects, while the C. vesivatoria is sold there 
at sixteen dollars the pound) have been substituted with great success, and | 
are said to vesicate more speedily, and with less pain, at the same time | 
that they cause no strangury®: and in China they have long employed the 
Mylabris cichorei, which seems to have been considered the most powerful 
vesicatory amongst the ancients, who however appear to have been ac- 
quainted with the common Cantharis vesicatoria also, and to have made 
use of if, as well as of Ceéonia aurata and some other insects mentioned by 
1 Gerbi, Storia Naturali d’un' Nuov. Inset, 1794, The same virtues have been 
ascribed to Coccinella septempunctata, L. 
2 Latr. Hist, Nat, des Fourmis, 48. 134. 
5 Jackson’s Marocco, 83. Some doubt, however, attaches to this statement, from 
the circumstance of the figure which Mr, Jackson gives of his beetle (Dibben 
Fashook) being clearly a mere copy of that of Mr. Bruce’s Zimb. 
__* This insect, generally so rare in England, appeared in the summer of 1837 
rent numbers in Essex, Suffolk and the Isle of Wight’ (nt. Mag. y. 208, 
° Illiger, Mag. i. 256. 
N 2 
