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The Timb, or Tsetze fly, is a species of this group of flies, and while it does not attack man, plagues to death, and is said to poison by its bite, the cattle in certain districts of the interior of Africa, thus almost barring out explorers. Like the mosquito, the females alone bite, the male Horse fly being harmless, and frequenting flowers, living upon their sweets.
The mosquitoes and the tsetze flies have been, only recently, proved to be the causes, the carriers, of diseases malaria, yellow fever, and sleeping sickness which annually have killed hundreds of thousands of men, colonists as well as natives.
It is possible that the death was due to more natural causes, such as the change of climate which attended the decline of the Glacial period, or to the attacks of some insect enemy like the tsetze fly of South Africa, which occasionally brings destruction to cattle in that part of the world.
The study of these and of the tsetze flies by skilled entomologists employed in the museum has been a necessary part of the steps now being taken everywhere to preserve human population from the attacks of certain deadly kinds among them, distinguished from the others which are harmless.
The subject of flies becomes of vast moment to a Pharaoh, whose ears are dinned with the buzz of myriad winged plagues, mingled with angry cries from malcontent and fly-pestered subjects; or to the summer traveller in northern lands, where they oppose a stronger barrier to his explorations than the loftiest mountains or the broadest streams; or to the African pioneer, whose cattle, his main dependence, are stung to death by the Tsetze fly; or the fariner whose eyes on the evening of a warm spring day, after a placid contemplation of his growing acres of wheat blades, suddenly detects in dismay clouds of the Wheat midge and Hessian fly hovering over their swaying tops.
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