was a very handsome fair young lady I knew once, and she was much bitten
about the arms, and neck, and face, so that her eyes were so swelled up
she couldn’t see. The spots rose up like blisters, the same as if stung
with a nettle, only on a very large scale. The bites were very much
inflamed, and after a time they had the appearance of boils.
“Some people fancy, and it is historically recorded, that the bug smells
because it has no vent; but this is fabulous, for they _have_ a vent. It
is not the human blood neither that makes them smell, because a young
bug who has never touched a drop will smell. They breathe, I believe,
through their sides; but I can’t answer for that, though it’s not
through the head. They haven’t got a mouth, but they insert into the
skin the point of a tube, which is quite as fine as a hair, through
which they draw up the blood. I have many a time put a bug on the back
of my hand, to see how they bite; though I never felt the bite but once,
and then I suppose the bug had pitched upon a very tender part, for it
was a sharp prick, something like that of a leech-bite.
“I once had a case of lice-killing, for my process will answer as well
for them as for bugs, though it’s a thing I never should follow by
choice. Lice seem to harbor pretty much the same as bugs do. I find them
in the furniture. It was a nurse that brought them into the house,
though she was as nice and clean a looking woman as ever I saw. I should
almost imagine the lice must have been in her, for they say there is a
disease of that kind; and if the tics breed in sheep, why should not
lice breed in us? for we’re but live matter, too. I didn’t like myself
at all for two or three days after that lice-killing job, I can assure
you; it’s the only case of the kind I ever had, and I can promise you it
shall be the last.
“I was once at work on the Princess Charlotte’s own bedstead. I was in
the room, and she asked me if I had found anything, and I told her no;
but just at that minute I _did_ happen to catch one, and upon that she
sprang up on the bed, and put her head on my shoulder, to look at it.
She had been tormented by the creature, because I was ordered to come
directly, and that was the only one I found. When the Princess saw it,
she said, ‘Oh, the nasty thing! That’s what tormented me last night;
don’t let him escape.’ I think he looked all the better for having
tasted royal blood.
“I also profess to kill beetles, though you never can destroy them so
effectually as you can bugs; for, you see, beetles run from one house to
another, and you can never perfectly get rid of them; you can only keep
them under. Beetles will scrape their way and make their road round a
fire-place, but how they go from one house to another I can’t say, but
they _do_.
“I never had patience enough to try and kill Fleas by my process; it
would be too much of a chivey to please me.
“I never heard of any but one man who seriously went to work selling
bug-poison in the streets. I was told by some persons that he was
selling a first-rate thing, and I spent several days to find him out.
But, after all, his secret proved to be nothing at all. It was
train-oil, linseed and hempseed, crushed up all together, and the bugs
were to eat it till they burst.
“After all, secrets for bug-poisons ain’t worth much, for all depends
upon the application of them. For instance, it is often the case that I
am sent for to find out one bug in a room large enough for a school.
I’ve discovered it when the creature had been three or four months
there, as I could tell by his having changed his jacket so often, for
bugs shed their skins, you know. No, there was no reason that he should
have bred; it might have been a single gentleman or an old maid.
“A married couple of bugs will lay from forty to fifty eggs at one
laying. The eggs are oval, and are each as large as the thirty-second
part of an inch; and when together are in the shape of a caraway comfit,
and of a bluish-white color. They’ll lay this quantity of eggs three
times in a season. The young ones are hatched direct from the egg, and,
like young partridges, will often carry the broken eggs about with
them, clinging to their back. They get their fore-quarters out, and then
they run about before the other legs are completely cleared.
“As soon as the bugs are born they are of a cream color, and will take
to blood directly; indeed, if they don’t get it in two or three days,
they die; but after one feed they will live a considerable time without
a second meal. I have known old bugs to be frozen over in a
horse-pond--when the furniture had been thrown in the water--and there
they have remained for a good three weeks; still, after they have got a
little bit warm in the sun’s rays, they have returned to life again.
“I myself kept bugs for five years and a half without food, and a
housekeeper at Lord H----’s informed me that an old bedstead that I was
then moving from a store-room was taken down forty-five years ago, and
had not been used since, but the bugs in it were still numerous, though
as thin as living skeletons. They couldn’t have lived upon the sap of
the wood, it being worm-eaten and dry as a bone. A bug will live for a
number of years, and we find that when bugs are put away in old
furniture without food, they don’t increase in number; so that,
according to my belief, the bugs I just mentioned must have existed
forty-five years: besides, they were large ones, and very dark colored,
which is another proof of age.
“It is a dangerous thing for bugs when they are shedding their skins,
which they do about four times in the course of a year; when they throw
off their hard shell and have a soft coat, so that the least touch will
kill them; whereas at other times they will take a strong pressure. I
have plenty of bug-skins, which I keep by me as curiosities, of all
sizes and colors, and sometimes I have found the young bugs collected
inside the old ones’ skins for warmth, as if they had put on their
father’s great-coat. There are white bugs--albinoes you may call
’em--freaks of nature like.”[925]
Notonectidæ--Water-boatmen.
Humboldt mentions that he saw insects’ eggs sold in the markets of
Mexico, which were collected on the surface of lakes. Under the name of
_Axayacat_, these eggs, or those of some other species of fly, deposited
on rush mats, are sold as a caviare in Mexico. Rev. Thomas Smith, who
makes the same statement, also says the Mexicans likewise eat the flies
themselves, ground and made up with saltpetre. Something similar to
these eggs, found in the pools of the desert of Fezzan, serves the Arabs
for food, having the taste of caviare.
In the Bulletin de la Société Impériale Zoologique d’Acclimation, M.
Guerin Méneville has published a paper on a sort of bread which the
Mexicans make of the eggs of three species of heteropterous insects.
According to M. Craveri, by whom some of the Mexican bread, and of the
insects yielding it, were brought to Europe, these insects and their
eggs are very common in the fresh waters of the lagunes of Mexico. The
natives cultivate, in the lagune of Chalco, a sort of carex called
touté, on which the insects readily deposit their eggs. Numerous bundles
of these plants are made, which are taken to a lagune, the Texcuco,
where they float in great numbers in the water. The insects soon come
and deposit their eggs on the plants, and in about a month the bundles
are removed from the water, dried, and then beaten over a large cloth to
separate the myriad of eggs with which the insects have covered them.
These eggs are then cleaned and sifted, put into sacks like flour, and
sold to the people for making a sort of cake or biscuit called “hautlé,”
which forms a tolerably good food, but has a fishy taste, and is
slightly acid. The bundles of carex are replaced in the lake, and afford
a fresh supply of eggs, which process may be repeated for an indefinite
number of times.
It appears that these insects have been used from an early period, for
Thomas Gage, a religionist, who sailed to Mexico in 1625, says, in
speaking of articles sold in the markets, that they had cakes made of a
sort of scum collected from the lakes of Mexico, and that this was also
sold in other towns.
Brantz Mayer, in his Mexico as it was and as it is, 1844, says: “On the
lake of Texcuco I saw men occupied in collecting the eggs of flies from
the surface of plants, and cloths arranged in long rows as places of
resort for the insects. These eggs, called _agayacath_, formed a
favorite food of the Indians long before the conquest; and when made
into cakes, resemble the roe of fish, having a similar taste and
appearance. After the use of frogs in France, and birds’-nests in China,
I think these eggs may be considered a delicacy, and I found that they
are not rejected from the tables of the fashionable inhabitants of the
capital.”
The more recent observations of MM. Saussure, Sallé, Virlet d’Aoust,
etc. have confirmed the facts already stated, at least in the most
essential particulars.
“The insects which principally produce this animal farinha of Mexico,”
says a writer in the Journal de Pharmacie, “are two species of the genus
_Corixa_ of Geoffroy, hemipterous (heteropterous) insects of the family
of water-bugs. One of the species has been described by M. Guerin
Méneville as new, and has been named by him _Corixa femorata_: the
other, identified in 1831 by Thomas Say as one of those sold in the
market at Mexico, bears the name of _Corixa mercenaria_. The eggs of
these two species are attached in innumerable quantities to the
triangular leaves of the carex forming the bundles which are deposited
in the waters. They are of an oval form with a protuberance at one end
and a pedicle at the other extremity, by means of which they are fixed
to a small round disk, which the mother cements to the leaf. Among these
eggs, which are grouped closely together, there are found others, which
are larger, of a long and cylindrical form, and which are fixed to the
same leaves. These belong to another larger insect, a species of
_Notonecta_, which M. Guerin Méneville has named _Notonecta
unifasciata_.”
It appears from M. Virlet d’Aoust, that in October the lakes of Chalco
and Texcuco, which border on the City of Mexico, are haunted by millions
of “small flies,” which, after dancing in the air, plunge down into the
water, to the depth of several feet, and deposit their eggs at the
bottom.
“The eggs of these insects are called hautle (haoutle) by the Mexican
Indians, who collect them in great numbers, and with whom they appear to
be a favorite article of food. They are prepared in various ways, but
usually made into cakes, which are eaten with a sauce flavored with
chillies.”[926]
Rev. Thomas Smith enumerates the following insects as eaten by the
ancient Mexicans: The _Atelepitz_, “a marsh beetle, resembling in shape
and size the flying beetles, having four (?) feet, and covered with a
hard shell.” The _Atopinan_, “a marsh grasshopper of a dark color and
great size, being no less than six inches long and two broad.”(!) The
_Ahuihuitla_, “a worm which inhabits the Mexican lakes, four inches
long, and of the thickness of a goose quill, of a tawny color on the
upper part of the body, and white upon the under part; it stings with
its tail, which is hard and poisonous.” And the _Ocuiliztac_, “a black
marsh worm, which becomes white on being roasted.”[927]
ORDER IX.
DIPTERA.
Culicidæ--Gnats.[928]
Concerning the generation of Gnats, Moufet says: “Countrey people
suppose them, and that not improbably, to be procreated from some
corrupt moisture of the earth.”[929]
A battle of Gnats (probably an appearance of Ephemera) is recorded in
Stow’s Chronicles of England, p. 509, to have been fought in the reign
of King Richard II.: “A fighting among Gnats at the King’s maner of
_Shine_, where they were so thicke gathered, that the aire was darkened
with them: they fought and made a great battaile. Two partes of them
being slayne, fel downe to the grounde; the thirde parte hauing got the
victorie, flew away, no man knew whither. The number of the deade was
such that they might be swept uppe with besomes, and bushels filled
weyth them.”[930]
In the year 1736 the Gnats, _Culex pipiens_, were so numerous in
England, that, as it is recorded, vast columns of them were seen to rise
in the air from the steeple of the cathedral at Salisbury, which, at a
little distance resembling columns of smoke, occasioned many people to
think the edifice was on fire.[931] At Sagan, in Silesia, in July, 1812,
a similar occurrence gave rise in like manner to an alarm that the
church was on fire.[932] In May of the following year at Norwich, at
about six o’clock in the evening, the inhabitants of that city were
alarmed by the appearance of smoke issuing from the upper window of the
spire of the cathedral, for which at the time no satisfactory account
could be given, but which was most probably produced by the same
cause.[933] And in the year 1766, in the month of August, they appeared
in such incredible numbers at Oxford as to resemble a black cloud,
darkening the air and almost intercepting the rays of the sun. Mr. John
Swinton mentions, that in the evening of the 20th, about half an hour
before sunset, he was in the garden of Wadham College, when he saw six
columns of these insects ascending from the tops of six boughs of an
apple-tree, two in a perpendicular, three in an oblique direction, and
one in a pyramidal form, to the height of fifty or sixty feet. Their
bite was so envenomed, that it was attended by violent and alarming
inflammation; and one when killed usually contained as much blood as
would cover three or four square inches of wall.[934] A similar column,
of two or three feet in diameter and about twenty feet in height, was
seen at eight o’clock in the evening of Sunday, July 14th, 1833, in
Kensington Gardens. The upper portion of the column being curved to the
east, the whole resembled the letter J inverted. The Gnats in every part
of the column were in the liveliest motion.[935] The author of the
“Faerie Queene” seems to have witnessed the like curious phenomenon,
which furnished him with the following beautiful simile:
As when a swarme of gnats at eventide
Out of the fennes of Allan doe arise,
Their murmuring small trumpets sownden wide,
Whiles in the air their clust’ring army flies,
That as a cloud doth seem to dim the skies;
Ne man nor beast may rest or take repast,
For their sharp wounds and noyous injuries,
Till the fierce northern wind with blust’ring blast
Doth blow them quite away, and in the ocean cast.
Ligon, in his History of Barbados, makes the following curious
observation relative to a species of insects which he calls “Flyes,” but
which are more probably Gnats or Mosquitoes: “There is not only a race
of all these kinds, that go in a generation, but upon new occasions, new
kinds; as, after a great downfall of rain, when the ground has been
extremely moistened, and softened with the water, I have walk’d out upon
a dry walk (which I made my self) in an evening, and there came about me
an army of such Flyes, as I had never seen before, nor after; and they
rose, as I conceived, out of the earth: They were as big bodied as Bees,
but far larger wings, harm they did us none, but only lighted on us;
their colour between ash-colour and purple.”[936]
If Gnats swarm in the summer in globular masses, it is supposed to
prognosticate a storm. Moufet says: “If Gnats near sunset do play up and
down in open air, they presage heat; if in the shade, warm and milde
showers; but if they altogether sting those that passe by them, then
expect cold weather and very much rain.... If any one would finde water
either in a hill or valley, let him observe (saith Paxanus in Geoponika)
the sun rising, and where the Gnats whirle round in form of an obelisk,
underneath there is water to be found. Yea, if Apomasaris deceive us
not, dreams of Gnats do foretell news of war or a disease, and that so
much the more dangerous as it shall be apprehended to approach the more
principall parts of the body.”[937]
“On the 14th of December, 1830, at Oremburg, snow fell accompanied by a
multitude of small black Gnats, whose motions were similar to those of a
flea.” This singular phenomenon was described at the session of the
Academy of St. Petersburg, held February 21st, 1831.[938]
The pertinacity of the _Culicidæ_ frequently renders them a most
formidable pest. Humboldt tells us “that between the little harbor of
Higuerote and the mouth of the Rio Unare, the wretched inhabitants are
accustomed to stretch themselves on the ground, and pass the night
buried in the sand three or four inches deep, exposing only the head,
which they cover with a handkerchief.”[939] As another proof of the
terrible state to which man is sometimes reduced by Mosquitoes, Captain
Stedman relates that in one of his dreadful marches, the clouds of them
were such, that the soldiers dug holes with their bayonets in the earth,
into which they thrust their heads, stopping the entry and covering
their necks with their hammocks, while they lay with their bellies on
the ground: to sleep in any other position was absolutely impossible. He
himself, by a negro’s advice, climbed to the top of the highest tree he
could find, and there slung his hammock among the boughs, and slept
exalted nearly a hundred feet above his companions, “whom,” says he, “I
could not see for the myriads of mosquitoes below me, nor even hear,
from the incessant buzzing of these troublesome insects.”[940]
“The Gnats in America,” says Moufet, “do so plash and cut, that they
will pierce through very thick clothing; so that it is excellent sport
to behold how ridiculously the barbarous people, when they are bitten,
will skip and frisk, and slap with their hands their thighs, buttocks,
shoulders, arms, and sides, even as a carter doth his horses.”[941]
Isaac Weld tells us that “these insects were so powerful and
bloodthirsty that they actually pierced through General Washington’s
boots.”[942] They probably crept within the boots, but the story is not
incredible if we believe Moufet. This naturalist says: “In Italy, near
the Po, great store and very great ones are to be seen, terrible for
biting, and venomous, piercing through a thrice-doubled stocking, and
boots likewise (_morsu crudeles et venenati, triplices caligas, imo
ocreas, item perforantes_), sometimes leaving behind them impoysoned,
hard, blue tumours, sometimes painful bladders, sometimes itching
pimples, such as Hippocrates hath observed in his Epidemics, in the body
of one Cyrus, a fuller, being frantic.”[943]
The poet Spenser, in his View of Ireland, says the Irish “goe all naked
except a mantle, which is a fit house for an outlaw--a meet bed for a
rebel--and an apt cloak for a thiefe. It coucheth him strongly against
the Gnats, which, in that country, doe more to annoy the naked rebels,
and doe more sharply wound them, than all their enemies’ swords and
speares, which can seldom come nigh them.”
Stewart says that the negroes of Jamaica, who cannot afford
mosquito-nets, get into a mechanical habit of driving away these
troublesome nocturnal visitors, that even when apparently wrapt in
profound sleep, there is a continual movement of the hands.[944]
Herodotus says: “The means devised by the Egyptians to avoid the Gnats,
which swarm in prodigious numbers, are these: Those who reside at some
elevation above the marshes, avail themselves of towers which they
ascend to sleep; for the Gnats, to avoid the winds, do not fly high.
While those who dwell on the very margins of the marshes, instead of
towers, practise another contrivance. Every man possesses a net, which,
during the day, he employs in catching fish, and which at night he uses
as his bed-chamber, where he places it over his couch, and so sleeps
within it. For if any one,” he concludes, “sleeps wrapped in a cloak or
cloth, the Gnats will bite him through it; but they never attempt to
penetrate the net.”[945] With regard to the conclusion of Herodotus,
that nets with meshes will effectually exclude Gnats, Tennent says he
has “been satisfied by painful experience that (if the theory be not
altogether fallacious) at least the modern mosquitoes of Ceylon are
uninfluenced by the same considerations which restrained those of the
Nile under the successors of Cambyses.”[946]
Jackson complains that after a fifty-miles journey in Africa, the Gnats
would not suffer him to rest, and that his hands and face appeared, from
their bites, as if he was infected with the small-pox in its worst
stage.[947] Dr. Clarke relates that in the neighborhood of the Crimea,
the Russian soldiers are obliged to sleep in sacks to defend themselves
from the mosquitoes; and even this, he adds, is not a sufficient
security, for several of them die in consequence of mortification
produced by these furious blood-suckers.[948]
When we consider these circumstances, it is not incredible that the army
of Julian the Apostate should be so fiercely attacked by these insects
as to be driven back; or that the inhabitants of various cities, as
Mouffet has collected from different authors,[949] should, by an
extraordinary multiplication of this plague, have been compelled to
desert them. Also the latter part of the following story, related by
Theodoret, seems entitled to belief: When Sapor, King of Persia, says
this historian, was besieging the Roman City of Nisibis in the year 360,
James, Bishop of that city, ascended one of the towers, and “prayed that
Flies and Gnats might be sent against the Persian hosts, that so they
might learn from these small insects the great power of Him who
protected the Romans.” Scarcely had the Bishop concluded his prayer,
continues Theodoret, when swarms of Flies and Gnats appeared like
clouds, so that the trunks of the elephants were filled with them, as
also were the ears and nostrils of the horses and of the other beasts of
burden; and that, not being able to get rid of these insects, the
elephants and horses threw their riders, broke the ranks, left the army,
and fled away with the utmost speed; and this, he concludes, compelled
the Persians to raise the siege.[950]
“As the Cossacks of the Black Sea are no agriculturists,” says Jaeger,
“but derive their subsistence from their numerous herds of horses, oxen,
sheep, goats, and hogs, they suffer immensely, at times, from the
ravages of the mosquitoes. Although they are fortunately not seen every
year, these blood-suckers may be considered a real Egyptian plague among
the herds of these Cossacks; for they soon transform the most delightful
plains into a mournful, solitary desert, killing all the beasts, and
completely stripping the fields of every animated creature. One thousand
of these insatiate tormentors enter the nostrils, ears, eyes, and mouth
of the cattle, who shortly after die in convulsions, or from secondary
inflammation, or from absolute suffocation. In the small town of
Elizabethpol alone, during the month of June, thirty horses, forty
foals, seventy oxen, ninety calves, a hundred and fifty hogs, and four
hundred sheep were killed by these flies.”[951]
Ammianus Marcellinus, in his Roman History, treating of the wild beasts
in Mesopotamia, gives us the following curious zoological theory on the
destruction of lions by mosquitoes:
“The lions wander in countless droves among the beds of rushes on the
banks of the rivers of Mesopotamia, and in the jungles, and lie quiet
all the winter, which is very mild in that country. But when the warm
weather returns, as these regions are exposed to great heat, they are
forced out by the vapours, and by the size of the Gnats, with swarms of
which every part of that country is filled. And these winged insects
attack the eyes, as being both moist and sparkling, sitting on and
biting the eyelids; the lions, unable to bear the torture, are either
drowned in the rivers, to which they flee for refuge, or else, by
frequent scratchings, tear their eyes out themselves with their claws,
and then become mad. And if this did not happen, the whole of the East
would be overrun with beasts of this kind.”[952]