The natural history of the Bible ; or, A description of all the quadrupeds, birds, fishes, reptiles, and insects, trees, plants, flowers, gums, and precious stones, mentioned in the sacred scriptures: Collected from the best authorities, and alphabetically arranged / by Thaddeus Mason Harris.

Thaddeus Mason Harris

Date:: 1824

Credit: The natural history of the Bible ; or, A description of all the quadrupeds, birds, fishes, reptiles, and insects, trees, plants, flowers, gums, and precious stones, mentioned in the sacred scriptures: Collected from the best authorities, and alphabetically arranged / by Thaddeus Mason Harris. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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$need, éannot shift to desert and dry places, are oblige in. order | to resist the zimb, to roll themselves in mud. and mire, which, ‘when dry, coats thats over like armour. « Of all those who have written of these holies, the prophet Isaiah alone has given us an account of this fly, and described the mode of its operations 75. | * Providence from the beginning, it would appear, had fixed. its habitation to one species of soil, which is black, fat earthi, extremely fruitful. In the plagues brought upon Pharaoh, it was by means of this contemptible, yet formidable: insect: that God said he would separate his people from the Egyptians. The land of Goshen, the possession of the Israelites, was a land of pasture, not tilled nor sown, because not overflowed by the Nile: but the land overflowed by the Nile was the black earth of the valley of Egypt, and it was here that God confined the zimb; for he says, it shall be a sign of this separation of the people which he had then made, that not one fly should be seen in the sand or pasture ground of the land of Goshen. And this kind of soil has ever since. been the refuge of all cattle emi- grating from the black earth to the lower part of Atbara.. So powerful is the weakest instrument in the hands of the Almighty! Isaiah, indeed, says, that ‘the fly shall be in all the desert places,’ and consequently, the sands; yet this was a particular dispensa- tion of providence, to answer a special end, the desolation of Egypt, and was not a repeal of the general law, but a confirma- tion of 1t—it was an exception for a particular purpose and a limited time. It was no trifling judgment, then, with which the prophet threatened the refractory Israelites, Isai. viu. 18. If the prediction be understood in the literal sense, it represents the oestra or cincinnelle, as the armies of Jehovah, summoned by him to battle against his offending people; or, if it be taken metaphorically, which 1s perhaps the proper way of expounding it, the prophet compares the numerous and destructive armies of Babylon to the countless swarms of these flies, whose distant hum is said to strike the quadrupeds with consternation, and whose bite inflicts, on man and beast, a torment almost insup- portable 79, 78 Chap. vii. 18. This verse, according to an amended translation, should read thus: “ And it shall come to pass, as in that day Jehovah did hiss for the fly that was in the end of the rivérs of Egypt, [alluding to the invasion of Sisac] so will he for the bee that is in the land of Assyria,” [predicting the conquest of Senacherib.] : See “ Critical Remarks on Isai. vii. 18,” by Granville Penn, Esq. 4to. Lond. 800. This method of gathering bees together by Aissing or whistling, (overcast) as we do now by beating of brass, was practised in Asia, in the fourth and .fifth centuries. Cyril speaks of it as a thing very common in his time; and so it is still in Lithuania and Muscovy, countries abounding in bees, where the master of the hives leads them out to feed and brings them home again by a blast of his whistle. Nature Displayed, v. iii. p. 25, Eng. ed. 12mo. Bochart, v, iii. 506,$