112 DIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 



discover, in this animal, no respiratory plates, such as are 

 found in the larvae of Muscidce, Sfc, nor were the tracheae 

 visible. When given to me, it was alive and extremely active, 

 writhing itself into various contortions with great agility. It 

 moved, like other dipterous larvae, by means of its mandibles. 

 Upon wetting my fingers more than once, to take it up when 

 it had fallen from a table upon which it was placed, the 

 saline taste with which it was imbued was so powerful that it 

 was some time before it was dissipated from my mouth. ' — 

 I shall only mention one more instance, because it is a sin- 

 gular one. The larva of Helophilus pendulus, a fly peculiarly 

 formed by nature for mhshiimg fluids, has been found in the 

 stomach of a woman.^ 



You will smile when I tell you that I have met with the 

 prescription of a famous urine-doctor, in which he recommends 

 to his credulous patient to take a certain number of sow bugs 

 per diem, by this name distinguishing, as I suppose, the pill- 

 millepede {Armadillo vulgaris^ once a very favourite remedy. 

 What effect they produced in this case I was not informed ; 

 but the learned Bonnet relates that he had seen a certificate 

 of an English physician, dated July 1763, stating that, some 

 time before, a young woman who had swallowed these animals 

 alive, as is usually done, threw up a prodigious number of 

 them of all sizes, which must have bred in her stomach.^ — 

 Another apterous species appears to have been detected in a 

 still more remarkable situation. Hermann, the author of the 

 admirable Memoir e Apterologique, whose untimely death is so 

 much to be lamented, informs us that an Acarus figured and 

 described in his work (A. marginatus), was observed by his 

 artist running on the corpus callosum of the brain of a patient 

 in the military hospital at Strasbourg, which had been opened 

 but a minute before, and the two hemispheres and t\iQpia mater 

 just separated. He adds that this is not the first time that 

 insects have been found in the brain. Cornelius Gemma, in 



1 Specimens of a dipterous larva, of which, like the above, several had been 

 discharged w^ith the urine of a patient, were exhibited to the Entomological 

 Society, April 4. 1840, by Professor Owen, who pointed out the great singularity 

 of the case, and the difficulty of accounting for the existence of the larva in the 

 bladder. ( Proceedings of Ent. Soc. Lond. p. 7. ) ' 



2 Philos. Map. ix. 366. 3 Bonnet, v. 144. 



