of the book fastens on the wrist or 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 though a net.[2] But, notwithstanding the opinion of Spence,[3] that nets with meshes an inch square will effectually exclude them, I have been satisfied by painful experience that (if the theory is 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:  Culex laniger?  Wied.  In Kandy Mr. Thwaites finds C. fuscanus, C. circumvolens, &c., and one with a most formidable hooked proboscis, to which he has assigned the appropriate name C.  Regius.]

[Footnote 2:  HERODOTUS, Euterpe, xcv.]

[Footnote 3:  KIRBY and SPENCE’S Entomology, letter iv.]

List of Ceylon Insects.

For the following list of the insects of the island, and the remarks prefixed to it, I am indebted to Mr. F. Walker, by whom it has been prepared after a careful inspection of the collections made by Dr. Templeton, Mr. E.L.  Layard, and others; as well as those in the British Museum and in the Museum of the East India Company.

“A short notice of the aspect of the Island will afford the best means of accounting, in some degree, for its entomological Fauna:  first, as it is an island, and has a mountainous central region, the tropical character of its productions, as in most other cases, rather diminishes, and somewhat approaches that of higher latitudes.

“The coast-region of Ceylon, and fully one-third of its northern part, have a much drier atmosphere than that of the rest of its surface; and their climate and vegetation are nearly similar to those of the Carnatic, with which this island may have been connected at no very remote period.[1] But if, on the contrary, the land in Ceylon is gradually rising, the difference of its Fauna from that of Central Hindostan is less remarkable.  The peninsula of the Dekkan might then be conjectured to have been nearly or wholly separated from the central part of Hindostan, and confined to the range of mountains along the eastern coast; the insect-fauna of which is as yet almost unknown, but will probably be found to have more resemblance to that of Ceylon than to the insects of northern and western India—­just as the insect-fauna of Malaya appears more to resemble the similar productions of Australasia than those of the more northern continent.

[Footnote 1:  On the subject of this conjecture see ante, Vol.  I. Pt.  I, ch. i. p. 7.]