Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/555

Rh M I T M I T 529 seven joints, rarely three; the feet are usually terminated by claws or suckers, or both, sometimes by bristles. The mandibles are generally large, oftenest chelate (like a lobster s claw), sometimes style-like piercing organs, and of other forms. The maxillae vary much: they may be piercing or crushing organs, or may coalesce to form a maxillary lip; there is usually one pair of maxillary palpi, no others. Sometimes there is a lingua, and in the Gamasidae a galea. Antennae are not found. Mites are distributed all over the known world. They have been found in Franz-Josef s Land and Spitsbergen and in the hottest tropical regions, as well as the temperate zones. Often very similar species come from all parts. They are numerous in amber of the Tertiary epoch. The best-known species are probably those which injure man or his works, viz., the itch mite, the cheese mite, the so-called harvest-bug, and the red spider. The dog-tick is also well known. The itch mite (Sarcoptes scabiei, fig. 3) is a minute, almost circular, flattened, colourless creature, with skin covered with wavy wrinkles, and a number of triangular points arising from that of the back ; legs short, the two front pairs and the fourth pair in the male terminated by suckers on long stalks, the two hind pairs in the female and third pair in the male having long bristles instead. It is parasitic on human beings: the males and young remain chiefly on the surface of the skin, but are difficult to find ; the female barrows under the scarf-skin, causing the intense itching of scabies by the action of her chelate mandibles as she eats her way. A small watery pustule is raised near where the acarus has entered the skin, and others arise ; the creature is not found i n Fm 3 The Itch Mite (^ ,, ^11 L ii f ^1 scaoiei) ; female. Alter Megiuu. the pustule, but at the further end of a short tunnel which may be half an inch long. The eggs are laid in the tunnel after the acarus has passed ; they hatch and multiply rapidly. The disease can be certainly cured ; the usual mode is to rub the whole body with sulphur ointment, which is best done after a warm bath, allow it to remain on all night, and wash off in the morning. This treatment should be repeated once or twice at intervals of a day or two. Other applications of sulphur, as sulphurous acid, sulphur vapour baths, &c., are efficacious. All clothes which have touched the skin must be disinfected by heat. The disease is highly contagious. Most mammals have their peculiar varieties of itch mite. The cheese mite (Tyroglyphus siro) is an elliptical, fat- bodied, colourless acarus with smooth skin and very long hairs. It breeds in thousands in old cheese, fiour, grain, &amp;lt;fcc., and does much damage. There are numerous allied species ; some belonging to the genus Glyciphayus are elegantly ornamented with plumes or leaf-like hairs. The red-spider (Tetranychus telarius) attacks the leaves of plants or trees, and is a great pest in green-houses. It spins a slight web on the surface of the leaves, and lives in companies on the web ; it is of a rusty red or brown. The harvest bugs, thought by some writers to be a species, and by them called Leptus autumnalis, are simply the larva; of several species of Trombidium. They are predatory, but will attach themselves temporarily to the human skin, and produce the violent itching felt on the lower parts of the legs after walking through dry grass in autumn. On inspection with a glass the creature may be seen as a minute scarlet point. A drop of benzine will probably get rid of the intruder. The dog tick, like the harvest-bug, is not really parasitic on mammals, though it attaches itself temporarily; its ordinary food may probably be vegetable. (A. D. M.) MITFORD, MARY RUSSELL (1786-1855), born at Aires- ford, Hampshire, on the 16th of December 1786, retains an honourable place in English literature as the authoress of Our Village, a series of sketches of village scenes and characters unsurpassed in their kind, and after half a century of imitations as fresh as if they had been written yesterday. Washington Irving was Miss Mitford s literary model, but her work is thoroughly original and spontaneous, the free outflow of a singularly charming character. The shortest account of her life would be incomplete without a reference to the scapegrace father who was the centre of her affections, and the &quot; only begetter &quot; of all that is most delightful and characteristic in her writing. Dr Mitford first spent his wife s fortune in a few years; then he spent also in a few years the greater part of 20,000 which his daughter drew (in 1797, at the age of ten) as a prize in a lottery; then he lived, for most years of his life, on a small remnant of his fortune and the proceeds of his daughter s literary industry. In the little village of Three Mile Cross, near Reading, in a small cottage which Miss Mitford says was &quot;a fine lesson in condensation,&quot; the doctor was the stay, support, and admiration of all the loafers in the neighbourhood, while his daughter, who had called herself his mamma, and treated him as her little boy from the time when she was herself a little girl, found an unfailing charm in his &quot; friskings,&quot; and was the loving slave of all his good-humoured exactions. The father kept fresh in his daughter the keen delight in incongruities, the lively sympathy with self-willed vigorous individuality, and the womanly tolerance of its excess which inspire so many of her sketches of character. The woman who lived in close attendance on such an &quot;awful dad,&quot; refused all holiday invitations because he could not live without her, and worked incessantly for him, except when she broke off her work to read him the sporting newspapers, evidently wrote from the heart in her bright portraits of such characters as the Talking Lady, the Talking Gentleman, Joel Brent, Jack Rapley, Tom Cordery, Lizzy, Lucy, and Harriet. Her writing has all the charm of perfectly unaffected spontaneous humour, combined with quick wit and exquisite literary skill. She died January 10, 1855. Miss Mitford s youthful ambition was to be &quot; the greatest English poetess,&quot; and her first publications were poems in the manner of Coleridge and Scott (Miscellaneous Verses, 1810, of sufficient mark to be reviewed by Scott in the Quarterly ; Christine, a metrical tale, 1811 ; Blanche, 1813). Later on she essayed writing plays (Julian, 1S23 ; The Foscari, 1826 ; Dramatic Scenes, 1827 ; Rien~i, 1828 ; Charles the First, 1828). But the prose to which she was driven by domestic necessities has rarer qualities than her verse. The first series of Our Village sketches appeared in 1824, a second in ]82G, a third in 1828, a fourth in 1830, a fifth in 1832, and Bclford llcgis, a novel in which the neighbourhood and society of Reading were idealized, in 1835. Her Rccolkctioyis of a Literary Life (1853) is a series of causer ics about her favourite books. Five volumes of her Life and Letters were published in 1870 and 1872, showing her to have been a delightful letter-writer ; two volumes of letters to her appeared in 1882. MITHRADATES, or, as it is often wrongly spelt, MITHRIDATES (i.e., &quot; given by the god Mithras &quot;), was a favourite name of the Pontic kings in the third and second centuries B.C., and was also common in Persia and the neighbouring countries. The dynasty of Pontus was a Persian family, claiming descent from the Achaimenida. , and the earliest of them known in history was satrap under the Persian empire. When that empire was destroyed Mithradates II. made himself king of Pontus; and he and his successors gradually spread their power over a great XVI. 67