Unfortunately for mankind, the female mosquito possesses a most elaborate instrument of torture.  She first warns us of her presence by the buzzing sound we know so well, and then settling upon her victim, thrusts into the quivering flesh five sharp organs, one of which is a delicate lancet.  These organs, taken in one mass, are called the beak, or bill of the insect.  A writer says:  “The bill has a blunt fork at the end, and is apparently grooved.  Working through the groove, and projecting from the centre of the angle of the fork, is a lance of perfect form, sharpened with a fine bevel.  Beside it the most perfect lance looks like a handsaw.  On either side of this lance two saws are arranged, with the points fine and sharp, and the teeth well-defined and keen.  The backs of these saws play against the lance.  When the mosquito alights, with its peculiar hum, it thrusts in its keen lance, and then enlarges the aperture with the two saws, which play beside the lance, until the forked bill, with its capillary arrangement for pumping blood, can be inserted.  The sawing process is what grates upon the nerves of the victim, and causes him to strike wildly at the sawyer.  The irritation of a mosquito’s bite is undoubtedly owing to these saws.  It is to be hoped that the mosquito keeps her surgical instruments clean, otherwise it might be a means of propagating blood diseases.”

While the mosquito is a sort of parasite, Professor Sanborn, the “Consulting Naturalist” of Andover, Massachusetts, informs me that he has discovered as many as four or five parasitical worms preying upon the inside tissues of the minute beak of the insect.

When the young female mosquito emerges from the water, she lays her eggs in the way described, and her offspring following in time her example, several broods are raised in a single season.  Many of the old ones die off; but a sufficient number hybernate under the bark of trees and in dwelling-houses, to perpetuate the species in the early spring months of the following year.

Another insect scavenger, found along the low shores of the Gulf, is the blow-fly, and one very useful to man.  Of one species of this insect the distinguished naturalist Reaumur has asserted that the progeny of a single female will consume the carcass of a horse in the same time that it will require a lion to devour it.  This singular statement may be explained in the following way.  The female fly discovers the body of a dead horse, and deposits (as one species does) her six hundred eggs upon it.  In twenty-four hours these eggs will hatch, producing about three hundred female larva, which feed upon the flesh of the horse for about three days, when they attain the perfected state of flies.  The three hundred female flies will in their turn deposit some hundred and eighty thousand eggs, which become in four days an army of devourers, and thus in about twelve days, under favorable circumstances, the flesh is consumed by the progeny of one pair of flies in the same time that a lion would devour the carcass.