their stomachs close to the earth, and their hind legs extended behind, they repose in comparative coolness, and bid defiance to their persecutors. DIPTERA. Mosquitoes. But of all the insect pests that beset an unseasoned European the most provoking by far is the truculent mosquito. Next to the torture which it inflicts, its most annoying peculiarities are the booming hum of its approach, its cunning, its audacity, and the perseverance with which it renews its attacks however frequently repulsed. These characteristics are so remarkable as fully to justify the conjecture that the mosquito, and not the ordinary fly, constituted the plague inflicted upon Pharaoh and the Egyptians. 1 Culex laniger? Wied. In Kandy Mr. Thwaites finds C. fuscanus, C. circumvolens, &c., and one with a most formidable hooked proboscis, to which he has assigned the appropriate name C. Regius. 66 " an 2 The precise species of insect by means of which the Almighty signalised the plague of flies, remains uncertain, as the Hebrew term arob or orov, which has been rendered in one place, "Divers sorts of flies," Ps. cv. 31; and in another, "swarms of flies," Exod. viii. 21, &c., means merely assemblage," a mixture,' or a "swarm," and the expletive "of flies" is an interpolation of the translators. This, however, serves to show that the fly implied was one easily recognisable by its habit of swarming; and the further fact that it bites, or rather stings, is elicited from the expression of the Psalmist, Ps. lxxviii. 45, that the insects by which the Egyptians were tormented "devoured them," so that here are two peculiarities inapplicable to the domestic fly, but strongly characteristic of gnats and mosquitoes. Bruce thought that the fly of the fourth plague was the "zimb of Abyssinia which he so graphically describes; and WESTWOOD, in an ingenious passage in his Entomologist's Text-book, p. 17, combats the strange idea of one of the bishops, that it was a cockroach! and argues in favour of the mosquito. This view he sustains by a reference to the habits of the creature, the swarms in which it invades a locality, and the audacity with which it enters the houses; and he accounts for the exemption of "the land of Goshen in which the Israelites dwelt," by the fact of its being sandy pasture above the level of the river; whilst the mosquitoes were produced freely in the rest of Egypt, the soil of which was submerged by the rising of the Nile. In all the passages in the Old Testament in which flies are alluded to, otherwise than in connection with the Egyptian infliction, the word used in the Hebrew is zero, which the Septuagint renders by the ordinary generic term for flies in general, uvia, "musca" (Eccles. x. 1, Isaiah vii. 10); but in every Even in the midst of endurance from their onslaughts one cannot but be amused by the ingenuity of their movements; as if aware of the risk incident to an open assault, a favourite mode of attack is, when concealed by a table, to assail the ankles through the meshes of the stocking, or the knees which are ineffectually protected by a fold of Russian duck. When you are reading, a mosquito will rarely settle on that portion of your hand which is within range of your eyes, but cunningly stealing by the underside of the book fastens on the wrist or little finger, and noiselessly inserts his proboscis there. I have tested the classical expedient recorded by Herodotus, who states that the fishermen inhabiting the fens of Egypt, cover their beds with their nets, knowing that the mosquitoes, although they bite through linen robes, will not venture through a net.1 But, notwithstanding the opinion of Spence 2, that nets with meshes an inch square will effectually exclude them, I have been satisfied by painful experience that (if the theory be not altogether fallacious) at least the modern mosquitoes of Ceylon are uninfluenced by the instance in which mention is made of the miracle of Moses, the Septuagint says that the fly produced was the Kuvoμvia, the "dog-fly." What insect was meant by this name it is not now easy to determine, but ÆLIAN intimates that the dogfly both inflicts a wound and emits a booming sound, in both of which particulars it accords with the mosquito (lib. iv. 51); and PHILOJUDEUS, in his Vita Mosis, lib. i. ch. xxiii., descanting on the plague of flies, and using the term of the Septuagint, Kvvoμvia, describes it as combining the characteristic of "the most impudent of all ani mals, the fly and the dog, exhibiting the courage and the cunning of both, and fastening on its victim with the noise and rapidity of an arrow” μετὰ ῥοΐζου καθάπερ Béλos. This seems to identify the dog-fly of the Septuagint with the description of the Psalmist, Ps. lxxviii. 45, and to vindicate the conjecture that the tormenting mosquito, and not the house-fly, was commissioned by the Lord to humble the obstinacy of the Egyptian tyrant. HERODOTUS, Euterpe, xcv. 2 KIRBY and SPENCE'S Entomology, letter iv. same considerations which restrained those of the Nile under the successors of Cambyses. The Coffee-Bug.-Allusion has been made in a previous passage to the coccus known in Ceylon as the "CoffeeBug (Lecanium Caffec, Wlk.), which of late years has made such destructive ravages in the plantations in the Mountain Zone. The first thing that attracts attention on looking at a coffee tree infested by it, is the number of brownish wart-like bodies that stud the young shoots and occasionally the margins on the underside of the leaves. Each of these warts or scales is a transformed female, containing a large number of eggs which are hatched within it. When the young ones come out from their nest, they run about over the plant like diminutive wood-lice, and at this period there is no apparent distinction between male and female. Shortly after being hatched the males seek the underside of the leaves, while the females prefer the young shoots as a place of abode. If the under surface of a leaf be examined, it will be found to be studded, particularly on its basil half, with minute yellowish-white specks of an oblong form. These are the larvae of the males undergoing transformation into pupa, beneath their own skins; some of these specks are always in a more advanced state than the others, the full-grown ones being whitish and scarcely a line The following notice of the "coffee-bug," and of the singularly destructive effects produced by it on the plants, has been prepared chiefly from a memoir presented to the Ceylon Government by the late Dr. Gardner, in which he traces the history of the insect from its first appearance in the coffee districts, until it had estab- Figs. 2, and 3 and 5 in the engraving, where these and all the other figures are considerably enlarged. |