Midges and other Bloodsuckers—The Tsetse of
South Africa—The Abyssinia — Livingstone—Adders and Grass Snakes—Lucan's Pharsalia—Celsus—Legend
of St. John ante
Portam Latmam.
Along the
west coast the weather is now [May 1872] as
mild and May-like as you could wish; the swallow twitters gaily in the
sunlight, and when he ceases his zig-zag flight for a moment to rest on
chimney-top or house-ridge, he sings a gladsome song, low and faint
indeed, and frequently lost on that account in the general chorus, but
exceedingly sweet and musical, as you will find if you give it the
attention it merits; while in the distance you hear the cheery notes of
the cuckoo, wild and startling as yet, as they burst suddenly upon the
ear from out the woodland glade or from the old rowan tree that finds
root room, you wonder how, in yonder crevice in the rock above the
foaming waterfall, hut soon to become familiar as the season advances,
and pressed upon your notice whether you will or no, and at all sorts of
impossible times and places, by the truant schoolboy's oft-repeated,
though rarely successful, attempts at imitation. For the first week in
May the temperature is unusually high, and we do not recollect ever
before having seen insect life so plentiful so early in the season.
Midges, gadflies, and other bloodsuckers are already astir in their
thousands, their taste for their favourite fluid keen and unabated, as
they fail not abundantly to manifest by an activity that one cannot help
admiring, even while wishing that it could possibly be directed to a
more legitimate and less personally annoying end. But "'tis their nature
to," as the hymn-book says, and we must grin and bear it, protecting
ourselves from their assaults as hest we may, thankful the while that
the evil is no worse. Our winged pests are innocence itself compared
with their congeners in other lands. Our midge, for instance, is to the
mosquito as the dog-fish is to the shark, as the domestic cat is to the
tiger; while our gadflies and Æstri, though
sufficiently annoying to our cattle at certain seasons, are to he
regarded as absolutely harmless if we compare them with the venomous Zimb of
Abyssinia, or the still deadlier Tsetse of
Southern Africa. The Abyssinian insect, by the way—the Zimb—is
probably the Zebub of
the Hebrew Scriptures, the estimation in which it was held from the
earliest ages being clearly enough indicated by its place in the word
Beelzebub, "the prince of devils." Livingstone's account of the Tsetse is
one of the most interesting chapters in his Travels. Shall
the intrepid explorer be restored to us? We are afraid not. It is only
too probable that, as Scott said of his protege and
friend, the author of the Scenes
of Infancy—
"A distant and a deadly shore
Has Leyden's cold remains!"
The districts of Ardgour and Sunart have always had an
unenviable notoriety for the great numbers of adders and grass snakes to
be found in them, the reptiles frequently attaining to a size unknown,
we believe, anywhere else in the West Highlands. Within the last two or
three years we have noticed that they are rapidly becoming numerous in
Lochaber, much more so than they used to be, though the general opinion,
in which we heartily concur, is that we were getting on very well
without them. During an ornithological ramble among the hills a few days
ago, we knelt to drink at a fountain that we fell in with, welling up
cool and sparkling beside a large moss-covered drift boulder among
the heather, when we were not a little startled by the presence of no
less than three adders that lay coiled together in a sort of Gordian
knot on a patch of green moss close by the fountain's brink. The day was
hot and dry, and they had probably come there to drink and bathe; but we
were very thirsty, having just smoked a pipe on the top of the hill, and
there being no appearance of water anywhere else for miles around, and
knowing, besides, that there could be really no danger, even if the
vipers had been ten times larger and more venomous than they were, we
drank a long draught of the pure sweet water, and then proceeded with
the stick in our hand to attack the enemy, and soon had the satisfaction
of knocking them into wriggling, writhing bits, and crushing their heads
under our heel. Our assault was so sudden and unexpected that they had
no time to show fight; otherwise an adder, when his blood is up and
thoroughly on his guard, is an ugly customer to attack with no better
weapon than a walking-stick, and nothing can be imagined more deadly,
wicked-looking, and savage than such an animal, as with erected crest
and flashing eye he steadies himself in act to strike. It is curious
that the poison of these reptiles, though certain death if commingled in
sufficient quantity with the blood through an abrasion or wound, is
perfectly innocuous if taken into the stomach—a fact, by the way, that
has been known from very early times. On taking our drink, for instance,
from yonder viper-guarded fountain, we recollected that Lucan had
something on a somewhat similar circumstance in his Pharsalia. Describing
Cato and his soldiers coming to a fountain of water in the desert, and
how horrified they were to find innumerable serpents of the deadliest
kind—asps and dipsades—disporting themselves in and around the pool, he
has the following fine passage, the finest indeed in the poem, which we
took care to turn up when we reached home :—
Which has been elegantly rendered into English as follows
:—
"And now with fiercer heat the desert glows,
And mid-day sun-darts aggravate their woes;
When, lo! a spring amid the sandy plain
Shows its clear mouth to cheer the fainting train;
But round the guarded brink in thick array,
Dire aspics roll'd their congregated way,
And thirsting in the midst the deadly dipsas lay.
Black horror seized their veins, and at the view
Back from the fount the troops recoiling flew;
When, wise above the crowd, by cares unquell'd,
Their trusted leader thus their dread dispell'd—
Let not vain terrors thus your minds enslave,
Nor dream the serpent brood can taint the wave;
Urged by the fatal fang their poison kills,
But mixes harmless with the bubbling rills.
'Dauntless he spoke, and, bending as he stood,
Drank with cool courage the suspected flood."
Celsus, an
older writer still, and styled the "Roman Hippocrates," tells us in his
great work, De
Medicina, that
the poison of serpents may be safely enough sucked by the mouth from the
wound, warning the operator, however, to be careful that the lips and
palate are free from any cut or excoriation by which the venom might
find its way into the blood, in which case it might be just as
'dangerous as if introduced into the circulation by the fang itself. It
should be stated that the grass or ringed snake spoken of above is not
in the least poisonous, though ugly enough to look at, and ready enough
to assume a threatening attitude if rudely disturbed. Nor, by the way,
is the date of the present writing inappropriate to the discussion of
such a subject, as we have at this moment discovered by the merest
accident. The 6th of May you will find is a Saint's day in the Calendar,
being dedicated to St. John ante
Portam Latinam, the
legend connected with which is as follows : —The Beloved Disciple, after
preaching the Gospel in various parts of the world, was in his old age
taken to Bome by the Emperor Domitian, and because he refused to
renounce the religion of Christ, was put into a cauldron of boiling oil
before the Latin Gate—Porta
Latina—which,
however, did him no more harm than did Nebuchadnezzar's fiery furnace to
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego; on the contrary, John came out of the
cauldron rejuvenated, younger, fairer, and more beautiful than before.
Afterwards a cup of deadliest poison was given him to drink, but as he
was putting it to his lips, the poison, assuming the appropriate shape
of a venomous serpent, glided from the cup, leaving the draught harmless
and pure. He was finally banished to Patmos, where he wrote the
Apocalypse.
Old Fingalian rhymes and proverbs having reference to
dogs and the hunting of the stag, as it was then pursued, are very
common in the Highlands, and show how devoted to the chase were our
Celtic ancestors. Our neighbour, the Rev. Mr. Clerk of Kilmallie, in his
splendid edition of Ossian, gives
some of these old rhymes in his very interesting and learned notes on
Fingal. The
following was sent us a short time ago, and as it has never appeared in
print, we present it to the reader with a liberal translation. "We are
always glad to be able to rescue from oblivion even the smallest shred
of the folk-lore of the olden time. The story goes that this rhyme was
first of all taught by a fairy to a gay young hunter "of the period,"
under the following circumstances :—Once upon a time, a sprightly,
green-robed fairy, a sort of princess in her way, fell in love with a
young Fingalian hunter, who had frequent occasion, on his way to and
from the chase, to pass the shian or
green knoll in which the fairy hand of the glen had taken up their
abode. The fairy and her hunter lover had frequent opportunities of
meeting in secret, until some evil-disposed sister fairy divulged
Brianag's— for that was the fairy's name—imprudent and unfairy-like
conduct to the powerful fairy prince Aerlunn, who was himself over head
and ears in love with the beautiful Brianag, though she gave him no
encouragement at all; on the contrary, she flatly told him that, great
and powerful as he was, she did not love him in the least, and would
have nothing to do with him. On hearing how things were going on,
Aerlunn was very jealous and very angry, just as a mortal might be under
similar circumstances, and he issued an edict, as Prince of the Fairies
of that glen, by which, after reflecting severely on the unfairy-like
conduct of Brianag and others of the band, he prohibited Brianag from
leaving the shian on
any pretence whatever, except for the one hour before midnight on the
night when the moon completed her first quarter—perfect liberty to do as
they like during this one hour in the month is every fairy's birthright,
and no power can deprive them of it. He would have done something very
dreadful to Brianag's lover, only the latter was protected from any evil
a fairy enemy could do to him by a talisman of extraordinary value,
which his uncle, a priest of the Druids, had given him, and which he
always carried on his person. Brianag and her lover were thus able to
meet for one hour in every month, despite the opposition of the angry
Aerlunn, whose jealousy became at last so insupportable, that he
resolved to shift his court and people from that glen to another at a
great distance. To this arrangement, much as she regretted it, as it
separated herself and her lover, Brianag dare not object. It is a
prerogative appertaining to the Princes of Fairyland that they can shift
their court at will, when and whither they please. The fairy palace thus
forsaken is still to be seen in Glen Etive, and has ever since been
called An
Sithean Samhach—the
Quiet or Deserted Eairy Knoll. On parting with her lover at their last
interview, Brianag presented him with a silver horn, whose blast could
be heard, loud and clear, over the Seven Hills and across the Seven
Glens ; and knowing that it was his ambition to excel all others in the
chase, she instructed him as to the best kind of dog to have and hunt
withal as follows :—
Which may stand in English thus :—
Get a yellow brindled dog,
First-born of his dam's first litter,
With a muzzle black as jet,
Reared on whey and milk of goats;
No stag in forest can escape him.
Those who rear deer-hounds, et
juvenes qui gaudent canibus, might
do worse than experiment a little according to the fairy's receipt; we
shouldn't wonder at all if a splendid dog was the result, for these old
rhymes are rarely devoid of reason. There is no reason at all events why
such a dog might not turn
out well. |