78 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 
nets, and to give them a reddish cast, while the men are so 
bitten as to be thrown into fevers. 
There is a small long shining fly in these parts very trouble- 
some to the housewife, by getting into the chimneys, and laying 
its eggs in the bacon while it is drying; these eggs produce 
maggots called jumpers, which, harboring in the gammons and 
best parts of the hogs, eat down to the bone, and make great 
waste. This fly I suspect to be a variety of the AZusca putris 
of Linnzus; it is to be seen in the summer in farm kitchens 
on the bacon-racks and about the mantel-pieces, and on the 
ceilings. 
The insect that infests turnips and many crops in the garden 
(destroying often whole fields while in their seedling leaves) is 
an animal that wants to be better known. ‘The country people 
here call it the turnip-fly and black dolphin; but I know it to 
be one of the coleoptera; “the jumping Chrysomela with the 
posterior part of the thigh very thick.” In very hot summers 
they abound to an amazing degree, and, as you walk in a field 
or in a garden, make a pattering like rain, by jumping on the 
leaves of the turnips or cabbages. 
There is an estrus, known in these parts to every plough- 
boy, which, because it is omitted by Linnzeus, is also passed 
over by late writers ; and that is the curvicauda of old Moufet, 
mentioned by Derham in his /hysico-Theology, p. 250; an 
insect worthy of remark for depositing its eggs as it flies in so 
dextrous a manner on the single hairs of the legs and flanks of 
grass-horses. But then Derham is mistaken when he advances 
that this @wstrus is the parent of that wonderful star-tailed 
maggot which he mentions afterwards; for more modern ento- 
mologists have discovered that singular production to be derived 
from the egg of the JZusca chameleon. 
A full history of noxious insects hurtful in the field, garden 
and house, suggesting all the known and likely means of de- 
stroying them, would be allowed by the public to be a most 
