102 DIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 



the whole atmosphere, filling the mouth, nostrils, eyes, and 

 ears of travellers, and thus preventing respiration, and almost 

 choking them. These little animals, he says, do not bite, but 

 torture incessantly by their titillation. ^ — In New South 

 Wales a small ant was observed by Sir Joseph Banks, in- 

 habiting 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 annoy- 

 ing 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 flies I mean those 

 myriads of them which form the most disagreeable circum- 

 stance 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, every thing is 

 attacked by them in such myriads, that if they are not in- 

 cessantly driven away by a person who has nothing else to do, 

 to eat a meal is impossible. They are however caught on 

 prepared paper and other contrivances with so much ease and 

 in such quantities, that were it not from negligence, they could 

 not aljound 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 any thing odd 

 in it." 3 



1 Lack. Lapp. i. 208, 209. Fl. Lapp. 382, 383. It appears, however, from 

 other authors, that they do bite, 

 ^-i Annual Obituary, 1828, p. 393. 



3 Young's Travels in France, i, 298. These flies are equally troublesome and 



