[Illustration:  POECILOPTERA TENNENTINA.]

[Illustration:  ELIDIPTERA EMERSONIANA.]

DIPTERA. Mosquitoes.—­But of all the insect pests that beset an unseasoned European the most provoking by far is the truculent mosquito.[1] Next to the torture which it inflicts, its most annoying peculiarities are the booming hum of its approach, its cunning, its audacity, and the perseverance with which it renews its attacks however frequently repulsed.  These characteristics are so remarkable as fully to justify the conjecture that the mosquito, and not the ordinary fly, constituted the plague inflicted upon Pharaoh and the Egyptians.[2]

[Footnote 1:  Culex laniger? Wied.  In Kandy Mr. Thwaites finds C. fuscanns, C. circumcolans, &c., and one with a most formidable hooked proboscis, to which he has assigned the appropriate name C.  Regius.]

[Footnote 2:  The precise species of insect by means of which the Almighty signalised the plague of flies, remains uncertain, as the Hebrew term arob or oror which has been rendered in one place.  “Divers sorts of flies,” Ps. cv. 31; and in another, “swarms of flies,” Exod. viii. 21, &c., means merely “an assemblage.” a “mixture” or a “swarm,” and the expletive. “of flies” is an interpolation of the translators.  This, however, serves to show that the fly implied was one easily recognisable by its habit of swarming; and the further fact that it bites, or rather stings, is elicited from the expression of the Psalmist, Ps. lxxviii. 45, that the insects by which the Egyptians were tormented “devoured them,” so that here are two peculiarities inapplicable to the domestic fly, but strongly characteristic of gnats and mosquitoes.

Bruce thought that the fly of the fourth plague was the “zimb” of Abyssinia which he so graphically describes:  and WESTWOOD, in an ingenious passage in his Entomologist’s Text-book. p. 17, combats the strange idea of one of the bishops, that it was a cockroach! and argues in favour of the mosquito.  This view he sustains by a reference to the habits of the creature, the swarms in which it invades a locality, and the audacity with which it enters the houses; and he accounts for the exemption of “the land of Goshen in which the Israelites dwelt,” by the fact of its being sandy pasture above the level of the river; whilst the mosquitoes were produced freely in the rest of Egypt, the soil of which was submerged by the rising of the Nile.

In all the passages in the Old Testament in which flies are alluded to, otherwise than in connection with the Egyptian infliction, the word used in the Hebrew is zevor, which the Septuagint renders by the ordinary generic term for flies in general, [Greek:  muia], “musca” (Eccles. x. 1, Isaiah vii. 10); but in every instance in which mention is made of the miracle of Moses, the Septuagint says that the fly produced was the [Greek:  kunomyia],