Und schnell zurück in unsre Hiemath flieh’n!
An English prose translation of which is: “Know’st thou now this country, where only briars and thistles bloom; where ugly fur-nuts only glow in the icy forest; where down in the vale the fetid hemlock grows, and on the hills the poisonous sumach; where heavy winds blow from black clouds over desolate lands? Dost thou not know of this country? Oh, then, let us fly in haste and return to our own fatherland!”
“To send one away with a Flea in his ear,” is a very old English phrase, meaning to dismiss one with a rebuke.[1053] “Flea-luggit” is the Scottish—to be unsettled or confused.[1054]
There is a collection of poems called “La Puce des grands jours de Poitiers”—the Flea of the carnival of Poitiers. The poems were begun by the learned Pasquier, who
edited the collection, upon a Flea which was found one morning in the bosom of the famous Catherine des Roches.[1055]
During the winter of 1762, at Norwich, England, after a chilling storm of snow and wind that had destroyed many lives, myriads of Fleas were found skipping about on the snow.[1056]
To the Pulicidæ belongs also a native of the West Indies and South America, the Pulex penetrans, variously named in the countries where it is found, Chigoe, Jigger, Nigua, Tungua, and Pique. According to Stedman, this “is a kind of small sand-flea, which gets in between the skin and the flesh without being felt, and generally under the nails of the toes, where, while it feeds, it keeps growing till it becomes of the size of a pea, causing no further pain than a disagreeable itching. In process of time, its operation appears in the form of a small bladder, in which are deposited thousands of eggs, or nits, and which, if it breaks, produce so many young Chigoes, which, in course of time, create running ulcers, often of very dangerous consequence to the patient; so much so, indeed, that I knew a soldier the soles of whose feet were obliged to be cut away before he could recover; and some men have lost their limbs by amputation—nay, even their lives—by having neglected in time to root out these abominable vermin. The moment, therefore, that a redness and itching more than usual are perceived, it is time to extract the Chigoe that occasions them. This is done with a sharp-pointed needle, taking care not to occasion unnecessary pain, and to prevent the Chigoe from breaking in the wound. Tobacco ashes are put into the orifice, by which in a little time the sore is perfectly healed.”[1057] The female slaves are generally employed to extract these pests, which they do with uncommon dexterity. Old Ligon tells us he had ten Chigoes taken out of his feet in a morning “by the most unfortunate Yarico,”[1058] whose tragical story is now so celebrated in prose and verse. Mr. Southey says that many of the first settlers of Brazil, before they knew the remedy to extract the Chigoes, lost their feet in the most dreadful manner.[1059]
Walton, in his Present State of the Spanish Colonies, tells us of a Capuchin friar, who carried away with him a colony of Chigoes in his foot as a present to the Scientific Colleges in Europe; but, unfortunately for himself and for science, the length of the voyage produced mortification in his leg, that it became necessary to cut it off to save the zealous missionary’s life, and the leg, with all its inhabitants, were tumbled together into the sea.[1060]
Humboldt observes “that the whites born in the torrid zone walk barefoot with impunity in the same apartment where a European, recently landed, is exposed to the attack of this animal. The Nigua, therefore, distinguishes what the most delicate chemical analysis could not distinguish, the cellular membrane and blood of an European from those of a Creole white.”[1061]