86 



DIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS, 



knives and lancets issuing from its mouth ? Yet such are the 

 instruments by means of which the fire-eyed and blood-thirsty 

 horse-fly {Tahanus L.) makes an incision in your flesh ; and 

 then, forming a siphon of them, often carries off many drops 

 of your blood. ^ The pain they inflict, when they open a 

 vein, is usually very acute. A fly of this kind not only oc- 

 casioned Mr. Sheppard considerable pain by its bite, but also 

 produced swelling and blackness round one eye ; and the 

 flesh of his cheek and chin was so enlarged from it as to hang 

 down. And Mr. W. S. MacLeay thus describes to me the 

 annoyance he suffered from one of them. I went down the 

 other day to the country, and was fairly driven out of it by 

 the Hcematopota pluvialis, which attacked me with such fury, 

 that although I did not at last venture beyond the door with- 

 out a veil, my face and hands were swelled to that degree as 

 to be scarcely yet recovered from the effects of their venom. 

 I was obliged on my return to town to stay two days at 

 home. Whenever this insect bites me it has this effect, and 

 I have never been able to discover any remedy for the torture 

 it puts me to." In this country, however, the attacks of 

 these flies are usually not frequent enough to make them 

 more than a minor " misery of human life ; " but the burning- 

 fly (brulot) or sand-fly of America^ and the West Indies, 

 which seem to be the same insect, causes a much more in- 

 tolerable anguish, which has been compared to what a red-hot 

 needle or a spark of fire would occasion us to endure. Lam- 

 bert, in 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 Captain Back, in his 

 Journey to the Arctic Sea (p. 117.), speaking of the misery 

 occasioned by these little tormentors, the brulots (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 



1 One took eight drops from Reaumur, iv. 230. 



2 Bartram's Travels, 383. 



3 i. 127. The West India sand-fly was noticed by the late Robinson Kittoe, 

 Esq., who however did not recollect their fetching blood. 



