If but one wing or leg of a fly is by any accident dropped into the food of an individual, and swallowed, the consequence is an immediate irritation of the stomach, answering the purpose of a powerful emetic.  At meals the flies are a pest, which most people say they abhor, knowing the consequences of an unlucky admission into the stomach of the smallest particle of the insect.  Their numbers exceed all calculation; the table is actually darkened by the myriads, particularly in the season of the periodical rains.  The Natives of India use muslin curtains suspended from the ceiling of their hall at meal times, which are made very full and long, so as to enclose the whole dinner party and exclude their tormentors.

The biles or blains, which all classes of people in India are subject to, may be counted as amongst the catalogue of Pharaoh’s plagues.  The most healthy and the most delicate, whether Europeans or Natives, are equally liable to be visited by these eruptions, which are of a painful and tedious nature.  The causes inducing these biles no one, as yet, I believe, has been able to discover, and therefore a preventive has not been found.  I have known people who have suffered every year from these attacks, with scarce a day’s intermission during the hot weather.[2]

The musquitoes, a species of gnat, tries the patience of the public in no very measured degree; their malignant sting is painful, and their attacks incessant; against which there is no remedy but patience, and a good gauze curtain to the beds.  Without some such barrier, foreigners could hardly exist; certainly they never could enjoy a night’s repose.  Even the mere buzzing of musquitoes is a source of much annoyance to Europeans:  I have heard many declare the bite was not half so distressing as the sound.  The Natives, both male and female, habitually wrap themselves up so entirely in their chuddah[3] (sheet) that they escape from these voracious insects, whose sounds are so familiar to them that it may be presumed they lull to, rather than disturb their sleep.

The white ant is a cruel destroyer of goods:  where it has once made its domicile, a real misfortune may be considered to have visited the house.  They are the most destructive little insects in the world doing as much injury in one hour as a man might labour through a long life to redeem.  These ants, it would seem, have no small share of animosity to ladies’ finery, for many a wardrobe have they demolished, well filled with valuable dresses and millinery, before their vicinity has even been suspected, or their traces discovered.  They destroy beams in the roofs of houses, chests of valuable papers, carpets, mats, and furniture, with a dispatch which renders them the most formidable of enemies, although to appearance but a mean little insect.