the “dog-fly.”  What insect was meant by this name it is not now easy to determine, but AELIAN intimates that the dogfly both inflicts a wound and emits a booming sound, in both of which particulars it accords with the mosquito (lib. iv, 51); and PHILO-JUDAEUS, in his Vita Mosis, lib. i. ch. xxiii., descanting on the plague of flies, and using the term of the Septuagint, [Greek:  kunomyia], describes it as combining the characteristic of “the most impudent of all animals, the fly and the dog, exhibiting the courage and the cunning of both, and fastening on its victim with the noise and rapidity of an arrow”—­[Greek:  meta roizou kathaper belos].  This seems to identify the dog-fly of the Septuagint with the description of the Psalmist, Ps. lxxviii. 45, and to vindicate the conjecture that the tormenting mosquito, and not the house-fly, was commissioned by the Lord to humble the obstinacy of the Egyptian tyrant.]

Even in the midst of endurance from their onslaughts one cannot but be amused by the ingenuity of their movements; as if aware of the risk incident to an open assault, a favourite mode of attack is, when concealed by a table, to assail the ankles through the meshes of the stocking, or the knees which are ineffectually protected by a fold of Russian duck.  When you are reading, a mosquito will rarely settle on that portion of your hand which is within range of your eyes, but cunningly stealing by the underside of the book fastens on the wrist or little finger, and noiselessly inserts his proboscis there.  I have tested the classical expedient recorded by Herodotus, who states that the fishermen inhabiting the fens of Egypt, cover their beds with their nets, knowing that the mosquitoes, although they bite through linen robes, will not venture through a net.[1] But, notwithstanding the opinion of Spence[2], that nets with meshes an inch square will effectually exclude them, I have 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.

[Footnote 1:  HERODOTUS, Euterpe. xcv.]

[Footnote 2:  KIRBY and SPENCE’S Entomology, letter iv.]

The Coffee-Bug.—­Allusion has been made in a previous passage to the coccus known in Ceylon as the “Coffee-Bug” (Lecanium Caffeae, Wlk.), which of late years has made such destructive ravages in the plantations in the Mountain Zone.[1] The first thing that attracts attention on looking at a coffee tree infested by it, is the number of brownish wart-like bodies that stud the young shoots and occasionally the margins on the underside of the leaves.[2] Each of these warts or scales is a transformed female, containing a large number of eggs which are hatched within it.

[Footnote 1:  The following notice of the “coffee-bug,” and of the singularly destructive effects produced by it on the plants, has been prepared chiefly from a memoir presented to the Ceylon Government by the late Dr. Gardner, in which he traces the history of the insect from its first appearance in the coffee districts, until it had established itself more or less permanently in all the estates in full cultivation throughout the island.]