Insect architecture / [Anon].

  • James Rennie
Date:
1830
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Insect architecture / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ineffectual to drive them, and have to use a goad, in form of an iron needle, at the end of a stick. Were the pain inflicted by the fly very acute, it would find it next to impossible to lay thirty or forty eggs without being killed by the strokes of the ox’s tail; for though Vallisnieri supposes that the fly is shrewd enough to choose such places as the tail cannot reach, Reau- mur saw a cow repeatedly flap its tail upon a part full of the gall-bumps; and in another instance he saw a heifer beat away a party of common flies from a part where there were seven or eight gall-bumps. He concludes, therefore, with much plausibility, that these two beasts would have treated the ox-flies in the same way, if they had given them pain when de- positing their eggs. The extraordinary effects produced upon cattle, on the appearance of one of these flies, would certainly lead us to conclude, that the pain inflicted is excru- ciating. Most of our readers may recollect to have seen, in the summer months, a whole herd of cattle start off across a field in full gallop, as if they were racing,—their movements indescribably awkward— their tails being poked out behind them as straight and stiff as a post, and their necks stretched to their utmost length. All this consternation has been known, from the earliest times, to be produced by the fly we are describing. Virgil gives a correct and lively picture of it in his Georgies *, of which the fol- lowing is a translation, a little varied from Trapp :— Round mount Alburnus, green with shady oaks, And in the groves of Silarus, there flies * Est lucos Silari circa illicibusque virentem Plurimus Alburnum volitans, cui nomen asilo Romanum est, CEstrum Graii vertere vocantes, Asper, acerba sonans; quo tota exterrita sylvis Diffugiunt armenta; furit mugitibus aether Concussus, sylvaeque et sicci ripi Tanagri. Georg, lib. HI. 1. 146,