United States or São Tomé and Príncipe ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
L. O. Howard, the United States Entomologist, Professor Le Conte, Mr. Charles Drury, of Cincinnati, and others, including a mass of medical witnesses, declaring from first-hand observation that the kissing-bug bite causes much swelling and severe pain. Le Conte, indeed, compares the effect to snake bite, and states that people are seriously affected for a week.
The kissing-bug is about half an inch in length, flat-backed, shaped in geometrically regular angles, and armed with a large, hard beak. It is this beak which does the damage, for the kissing-bug is a fighter and will risk a prod at anything that gives it cause of offense.
Not the least interesting phase of the kissing-bug scare is the rapidity and completeness of its decadence. It is but ten years ago that the newspapers rang with it; that victims of the bite, in every city, were fleeing, white-faced and racked with forebodings, to doctor or hospital. To-day, both the Melanolestes and the "conenose" are abroad in the land.
The miscreant was a fine specimen of Reduvius personatus, the cone-nosed blood-sucker, soon thereafter to achieve heights of newspaper notoriety together with its cousin, Melanolestes picipes, as the "kissing-bug."
From Washington it spread over the country, and became the topic of the day, until any insect bite or sting mosquito, hornet, bedbug, or whatnot was magnified by the hysteria of the patient and the credulousness of the public into a "dangerous" instance of kissing-bug poisoning. Reports of fatal cases, however, invariably proved to be canards.
Beside him crouched two prairie-dogs who were combing his hair very carefully, while a red squirrel perched near his head and fanned him with her bushy tail. "Dear me, what have we here?" exclaimed the King of the Jungle, in a querulous tone, "Is it an over-grown pinch-bug, or is it a kissing-bug?" "I have the honor to be a Woggle-Bug, your Majesty!" replied our hero, proudly.
So is the wholly mythical puff adder. In hardly less degree is the tarantula "deadly," while varying lethal capacities are ascribed to the centipede, the scorpion, the kissing-bug, and sundry other forms of insect life. The whole matter is based upon the slenderest foundations. I don't mean, by this, that these ill-famed species are wholly innocuous.
Thereby the spider family was relieved of much unmerited odium, for it is more than suspected by entomologists that a large proportion of so-called spider bites are really the work of the more vicious but less formidable-appearing kissing-bug, as is often evidenced by the nature of the puncture.
Word Of The Day