Curious Facts in the History of Insects; Including Spiders and Scorpions Part 26

"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 quant.i.ty 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 sh.e.l.l 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]

Notonectidae--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 Societe Imperiale Zoologique d'Acclimation, M.

Guerin Meneville 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 toute, 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 "hautle,"

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 sc.u.m 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, Salle, Virlet d'Aoust, etc. have confirmed the facts already stated, at least in the most essential particulars.

"The insects which princ.i.p.ally 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 Meneville 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 quant.i.ties 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 Meneville 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 sh.e.l.l." The _Atopinan_, "a marsh gra.s.shopper 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.

Culicidae--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 cl.u.s.t'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 bl.u.s.t'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 ma.s.ses, 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 pa.s.se 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 Paxa.n.u.s 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 princ.i.p.all parts of the body."[937]

"On the 14th of December, 1830, at Oremburg, snow fell accompanied by a mult.i.tude 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 _Culicidae_ 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 pa.s.s 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, b.u.t.tocks, 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 ent.i.tled 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]

Ammia.n.u.s 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]

I have never heard of mosquitoes being turned to any good account save in California; and there, it seems, according to Rev. Walter Colton, they are sometimes made the ministers of justice. A rogue had stolen a bag of gold from a digger in the mines, and hid it. Neither threats nor persuasions could induce him to reveal the place of its concealment. He was at last sentenced to a hundred lashes, and then informed that he would be let off with thirty, provided he would tell what he had done with the gold; but he refused. The thirty lashes were administered, but he was still stubborn as a mule. He was then stripped naked, and tied to a tree. The mosquitoes with their long bills went at him, and in less than three hours he was covered with blood. Writhing and trembling from head to foot with exquisite torture, he exclaimed, "Untie me, untie me, and I will tell where it is." "Tell first," was the reply. So he told where it might be found. Then some of the party with wisps kept off the still hungry mosquitoes, while others went where the culprit directed, and recovered the bag of gold. He was then untied, washed with cold water, and helped to his clothes, while he muttered, as if talking to himself, "I couldn't stand that anyhow."[953]

The largest kind of mosquito in the valley of the lower Mississippi is called the "Gallinipper." It is peculiarly described, by the boatmen, to be as large as a goose, and that it flies about at night with a brickbat under its wings with which it sharpens its "sting."

They tell a good story to show the superiority of the Gallinipper, over the ordinary Mosquito, in this wise. Some fellow made a bet that, for a certain length of time, he could stand the stings of the mosquitoes inflicted upon his bare back while he lay on his face. He stripped himself for the ordeal, and was bearing it manfully, when some mischievous spectator threw a live coal of fire on him. He winced, and, looking up by way of protest, exclaimed, "I bar (debar) the Gallinipper."

The Culicidae, say Kirby and Spence, like other conquerors who have been the torment of the human race, have attained to fame, and have given their names to bays, towns, and even to considerable territories; and instance Mosquito Bay in St. Christopher's; Mosquito, a town in the Island of Cuba; and the Mosquito Sh.o.r.e of Central America.[954]

Democritus says: "Horse-hair, stretched through the door, and through the middle of the house, destroys Gnats."[955]

St. Macarius, Alban Butler says, was a confectioner of Alexandria, who, in the flower of his age, spent upwards of sixty years in the deserts in labor, penance, and contemplation. "Our Saint," continues Butler, "happened one day to inadvertently kill a Gnat that was biting him in his cell; reflecting that he had lost the opportunity of suffering that mortification, he hastened from the cell for the marshes of Scete, which abound with great flies, whose stings pierce even wild boars. There he continued six months, exposed to those ravaging insects; and to such a degree was his whole body disfigured by them with sores and swellings, that when he returned he was only to be known by his voice."[956]