HARVEST-BUG, the familiar name for mites of the family Trombidiidae, belonging to the order Acari of the class Arachnida. Although at one time regarded as constituting a distinct species, described as Leptus autumnalis, harvest-bugs are now known to be the six-legged larval forms of several British species of mites of the genus Trombidium. They are minute, rusty-brown organisms, barely visible to the naked eye, which swarm in grass and low herbage in the summer and early autumn, and cause considerable, sometimes intense, irritation by piercing and adhering to the skin of the leg, usually lodging themselves in some part where the clothing is tight, such as the knee when covered with gartered stockings. They may be readily destroyed, and the irritation allayed, by rubbing the affected area with some insecticide like turpentine or benzine. They are not permanently parasitic, and if left alone will leave their temporary host to resume the active life characteristic of the adult mite, which is predatory in habits, preying upon minute living animal organisms.
HARVESTER, Harvest-Spider, or Harvest-Man, names given to Arachnids of the order Opiliones, referable to various species of the family Phalangiidae. Harvest-spiders or harvest-men, so-called on account of their abundance in the late summer and early autumn, may be at once distinguished from all true spiders by the extreme length and thinness of their legs, and by the small size and spherical or oval shape of the body, which is not divided by a waist or constriction into an anterior and a posterior region. They may be met with in houses, back yards, fields, woods and heaths; either climbing on walls, running over the grass, or lurking under stones and fallen tree trunks. They are predaceous, feeding upon small insects, mites and spiders. The males are smaller than the females, and often differ from them in certain well-marked secondary sexual characters, such as the mandibular protuberance from which one of the common English spiders, Phalangium cornutum, takes its scientific name. The male is also furnished with a long and protrusible penis, and the female with an equally long and protrusible ovipositor. The sexes pair in the autumn, and the female, by means of her ovipositor, lays her eggs in some cleft or hole in the soil and leaves them to their fate. After breeding, the parents die with the autumn cold; but the eggs retain their vitality through the winter and hatch with the warmth of spring and early summer, the young gradually attaining maturity as the latter season progresses. Hence the prevalence of adult individuals in the late summer and autumn, and at no other time of the year. They are provided with a pair of glands, situated one on each side of the carapace, which secrete an evil-smelling fluid believed to be protective in nature. Harvest-men are very widely distributed and are especially abundant in temperate countries of the northern hemisphere. They are also, however, common in India, where they are well known for their habit of adhering together in great masses, comparable to a swarm of bees, and of swaying gently backwards and forwards. The long legs of harvest-men serve them not only as organs of rapid locomotion, but also as props to raise the body well off the ground, thus enabling the animals to stalk unmolested from the midst of an army of raiding ants.
(R. I. P.)
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| Fig. 1.—Harvest-man (Phalangium cornutum, Linn.); profile ofmale, with legs and palpi truncated. | |
a, Ocular tubercle. b, Mandible. c, Labrum (upper lip). | d, Sheath of penis protruded. e, Penis. f, The glans. |
HARVEY, GABRIEL (c. 1545-1630), English writer, eldest son of a ropemaker of Saffron-Walden, Essex, was born about 1545. He matriculated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1566, and in 1570 was elected fellow of Pembroke Hall. Here he formed a lasting friendship with Edmund Spenser, and it has been suggested (Athen. Cantab., ii. 258) that he may have been the poet’s tutor. Harvey was a scholar of considerable weight, who has perhaps been judged too exclusively from the brilliant invectives directed against him by Thomas Nashe. Henry Morley, writing in the Fortnightly Review (March 1869), brought evidence from Harvey’s Latin writings which shows that he was distinguished by quite other qualities than the pedantry and conceit usually associated with his name. He desired to be “epitaphed as the Inventour of the English Hexameter,” and was the prime mover in the literary clique that desired to impose on English verse the Latin rules of quantity. In a “gallant, familiar letter” to M. Immerito (Edmund Spenser) he says that Sir Edward Dyer and Sir Philip Sidney were helping forward “our new famous enterprise for the exchanging of Barbarous and Balductum Rymes with Artificial Verses.” The document includes a tepid appreciation of the Faerie Queene which had been sent to him for his opinion, and he gives examples of English hexameters illustrative of the principles enunciated in the correspondence. The opening lines—
| “What might I call this Tree? A Laurell? O bonny Laurell Needes to thy bowes will I bow this knee, and vayle my bonetto”— |
afford a fair sample of the success of Harvey’s metrical experiments, which presented a fair mark for the wit of Thomas Nashe. “He (Harvey) goes twitching and hopping in our language like a man running upon quagmires, up the hill in one syllable, and down the dale in another,” says Nashe in Strange Newes, and he mimics him in the mocking couplet:
| “But eh! what news do you hear of that good Gabriel Huffe-Snuffe, Known to the world for a foole, and clapt in the Fleete for a Runner?” |