Page:White - The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne.djvu/110

 tumours which itch intolerably. This animal (which we call an harvest-bug) is very minute, scarce discernible to the naked eye; of a bright scarlet colour, and of the genus of Acarus. They are to to be met with in gardens on kidney-beans, or any legumens; but prevail only in the hot months of summer. Warreners, as some have assured me, are much infested by them on chalky downs; where these insects swarm sometimes to so infinite a degree as to discolour their 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 troublesome 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, harbouring 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 musca putris of Linnaeus: it is to be seen in the summer in the farm-kitchens on the bacon-racks and about the mantelpieces, 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 'chrysomela oleracea, saltatoria, femoribus posficis crassissimis.' 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 oestrus, known in these parts to every ploughboy; which, because it is omitted by Linnaeus, is also passed over by late writers, and that is the curvicauda of old Moufet, mentioned