on the CEstri and Cuterebroe of various Animals. 87 
by Linnaeus, supposing it to be a bot of the nose. How Dr. Leach could alto¬ 
gether pass over my CE. veterinus in his enumeration is quite inexplicable, 
figures of it appearing in the Linnean Transactions, admirably done by Syden¬ 
ham Edwards, and again repeated in my dissertation. 
Fabricius, than whom no one hardly has described insects better, in his last 
work has honoured my labours with his notice, adopting my suggestions in 
most, particulars, but seems to have had some lurking hesitation about the 
propriety of my genus Cuterebra, whose characters in contrast to the CEstri 
are of the most marked kind, differing from them in several highly essential 
particulars, in which Latreille and all later naturalists, with whose opinions I 
have become acquainted, have most readily acquiesced. 
I may here transiently notice, that some time since a communication ap¬ 
peared in the Linnean Society’s Transactions, vol. xiv. p. 353, from the pen of 
my friend Mr. W. Sharp MacLeav, endeavouring to prove that the Linnean 
genus CEstrus did not represent the Oistros of the Greek writers. This idea 
he derived from France, the same opinion or suggestion being found in Olivier 
(see Encyclopedic Methodique, Hist, Nat. viii. p. 453), and afterwards in La¬ 
treille and others, supposing that a Tabanus was more likely to have been the 
object noticed by the ancients. This, however, I disproved clearly, establish¬ 
ing my deductions from the terror of the animals under the attack of this fly, 
which had been so well described by their poets that it at once fixed the ob¬ 
ject ; since no other of the fly kind save the little gnat accompanies his attack 
with any sound, (and that this gnat was not the object of their descriptions was 
\eiy cleai,) and the Tabani are all silent in their blood-sucking attacks. Other 
reasons were also there advanced, and were deemed by all unprejudiced readers 
sufficient to dispiove any such idea; had however the contrary happened, and 
a change had taken place, it would have been accompanied with the most 
lamentable confusion in these pursuits. See Linn. Trans, vol. xv. p. 406 for 
my reply. 
I am reluctantly compelled to expunge yet one more supposed species of this 
genus, which is evidently the result of careless compilation on the part of the 
German naturalists. De Villars of Lyons, in his useful and candid work, the 
£ Entomologia,’ has presented us with an CEstrus which he calls by the specific 
name of lineatus ; this is copied into the works of Meigen, Megerle and others 
as a new and true species. Conversant and familiar with the appearances of 
