If Gnats swarm in the summer in globular masses, it is supposed to prognosticate a storm. Moufet says: “If Gnats near sunset do play up and down in open air, they presage heat; if in the shade, warm and milde showers; but if they altogether sting those that passe by them, then expect cold weather and very much rain.… If any one would finde water either in a hill or valley, let him observe (saith Paxanus in Geoponika) the sun rising, and where the Gnats whirle round in form of an obelisk, underneath there is water to be found. Yea, if Apomasaris deceive us not, dreams of Gnats do foretell news of war or a disease, and that so much the more dangerous as it shall be apprehended to approach the more principall parts of the body.”[937]
“On the 14th of December, 1830, at Oremburg, snow fell accompanied by a multitude of small black Gnats, whose motions were similar to those of a flea.” This singular phenomenon was described at the session of the Academy of St. Petersburg, held February 21st, 1831.[938]
The pertinacity of the Culicidæ frequently renders them a most formidable pest. Humboldt tells us “that between the little harbor of Higuerote and the mouth of the Rio Unare, the wretched inhabitants are accustomed to stretch themselves on the ground, and pass the night buried in the sand three or four inches deep, exposing only the head, which they cover with a handkerchief.”[939] As another proof of the terrible state to which man is sometimes reduced by Mosquitoes, Captain Stedman relates that in one of his
dreadful marches, the clouds of them were such, that the soldiers dug holes with their bayonets in the earth, into which they thrust their heads, stopping the entry and covering their necks with their hammocks, while they lay with their bellies on the ground: to sleep in any other position was absolutely impossible. He himself, by a negro’s advice, climbed to the top of the highest tree he could find, and there slung his hammock among the boughs, and slept exalted nearly a hundred feet above his companions, “whom,” says he, “I could not see for the myriads of mosquitoes below me, nor even hear, from the incessant buzzing of these troublesome insects.”[940]
“The Gnats in America,” says Moufet, “do so plash and cut, that they will pierce through very thick clothing; so that it is excellent sport to behold how ridiculously the barbarous people, when they are bitten, will skip and frisk, and slap with their hands their thighs, buttocks, shoulders, arms, and sides, even as a carter doth his horses.”[941] Isaac Weld tells us that “these insects were so powerful and bloodthirsty that they actually pierced through General Washington’s boots.”[942] They probably crept within the boots, but the story is not incredible if we believe Moufet. This naturalist says: “In Italy, near the Po, great store and very great ones are to be seen, terrible for biting, and venomous, piercing through a thrice-doubled stocking, and boots likewise (morsu crudeles et venenati, triplices caligas, imo ocreas, item perforantes), sometimes leaving behind them impoysoned, hard, blue tumours, sometimes painful bladders, sometimes itching pimples, such as Hippocrates hath observed in his Epidemics, in the body of one Cyrus, a fuller, being frantic.”[943]
The poet Spenser, in his View of Ireland, says the Irish “goe all naked except a mantle, which is a fit house for an outlaw—a meet bed for a rebel—and an apt cloak for a thiefe. It coucheth him strongly against the Gnats, which, in that country, doe more to annoy the naked rebels, and
doe more sharply wound them, than all their enemies’ swords and speares, which can seldom come nigh them.”
Stewart says that the negroes of Jamaica, who cannot afford mosquito-nets, get into a mechanical habit of driving away these troublesome nocturnal visitors, that even when apparently wrapt in profound sleep, there is a continual movement of the hands.[944]
Herodotus says: “The means devised by the Egyptians to avoid the Gnats, which swarm in prodigious numbers, are these: Those who reside at some elevation above the marshes, avail themselves of towers which they ascend to sleep; for the Gnats, to avoid the winds, do not fly high. While those who dwell on the very margins of the marshes, instead of towers, practise another contrivance. Every man possesses a net, which, during the day, he employs in catching fish, and which at night he uses as his bed-chamber, where he places it over his couch, and so sleeps within it. For if any one,” he concludes, “sleeps wrapped in a cloak or cloth, the Gnats will bite him through it; but they never attempt to penetrate the net.”[945] With regard to the conclusion of Herodotus, that nets with meshes will effectually exclude Gnats, Tennent says he has “been satisfied by painful experience that (if the theory be not altogether fallacious) at least the modern mosquitoes of Ceylon are uninfluenced by the same considerations which restrained those of the Nile under the successors of Cambyses.”[946]
Jackson complains that after a fifty-miles journey in Africa, the Gnats would not suffer him to rest, and that his hands and face appeared, from their bites, as if he was infected with the small-pox in its worst stage.[947] Dr. Clarke relates that in the neighborhood of the Crimea, the Russian soldiers are obliged to sleep in sacks to defend themselves from the mosquitoes; and even this, he adds, is not a sufficient security, for several of them die in consequence of mortification produced by these furious blood-suckers.[948]