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its operation (Isaiah, vii. 18, 19): ‘And it shall come to pass in that 
day, that the Lord shall hiss for the fly that is in the uttermost part 
of the rivers of Egypt .... and they shall come, and shall rest all of 
them in the desolate valleys, and in the holes of the rocks, and upon 
all thorns, and upon all bushes.’ ” (Travels, ii. pp. 314-317.) 
“ Tsaltsalya , or Fly. —We are obliged with the greatest surprise 
to acknowledge that those huge animals, the elephant, the rhinoceros, 
the lion and the tiger, inhabiting the same woods, are still vastly this 
fly’s inferiors ; and that the appearance of this small insect, nay, his 
very sound, though he is not seen, occasions more trepidation, move¬ 
ment and disorder, both in the human and brute creation, than whole 
herds of these monstrous animals collected together, though their 
number was in a tenfold proportion greater than it really is. Provi¬ 
dence from the beginning it would seem had fixed its habitation to 
one species of soil, being a black fat earth, extraordinarily fruitful. 
“ We cannot read the history of the plagues which God brought 
upon Pharaoh by the hands of Moses, without stopping a moment to 
consider a singularity, a very principal one, which attended the plague 
of the fly. The land of Goshen, the possession of the Israelites, was 
a land of promise which was not tilled or sown, because it was not 
overflowed by the Nile. But the land overflowed by the Nile was the 
black earth of the Valley of Egypt, and it was here that God confined 
the flies.—I have magnified him about twice the natural size.—He 
has no sting, though he seems to me to be rather of the bee kind; 
but his motion is more rapid and sudden than that of the bee, and 
resembles that of the gad-fly in England. There is something par¬ 
ticular in the sound or buzzing of this insect. It is a jarring noise, 
together with a humming, which induces me to believe that it pro¬ 
ceeds, at least in part, from a vibration made with the three hairs at 
his snout. 
“ The Chaldee Version is content with calling this animal simply 
Zebub, which signifies the fly in general as we express it in English. 
The Arabs call it Arob in their translation, which has the same gene¬ 
ral signification. The Ethiopic translation calls it Tsai tsalya, which 
is the true name of this particular fly in Geez, and was the same in 
Hebrew. The Greeks have called this species of fly Cynomyia, which 
signifies the dog-fly; in imitation of which, those I suppose of the 
church of Alexandria that, after the coming of Frumentius, were cor¬ 
recting the Greek copy and making it conformable to the Septuagint, 
have called this fly Tsai tsalya Kelb, in answ r er to the word Cynomyia. 
Salal in the Hebrew signifies c to buzz ’ or ‘ to hum,’ and as it were 
alludes to the noise with which the animal terrifies the cattle; and 
Tsai tsalya seems to come from this by only doubling the radicals : 
t’Tsalalou*, in Amharic, signifies ‘to pierce with violence.’”— 
Appendix, Hi. 284 et seq. 
* “ The name of this fly is undoubtedly derived from a word signifying ‘to buzz’ 
in Hebrew and Ethiopic. The drawing seems to have been made from a pre¬ 
served subject, an eminent naturalist (the late Prof. Walker) having observed that 
some of the finer parts are wanting in it. These may have been lost in keeping, or 
during the drawing of it at home. —Edit.” 
