The pertinacity of the _Culicidæ_ frequently renders them a most formidable pest. Humboldt tells us “that between the little harbor of Higuerote and the mouth of the Rio Unare, the wretched inhabitants are accustomed to stretch themselves on the ground, and pass the night buried in the sand three or four inches deep, exposing only the head, which they cover with a handkerchief.”[939] As another proof of the terrible state to which man is sometimes reduced by Mosquitoes, Captain Stedman relates that in one of his dreadful marches, the clouds of them were such, that the soldiers dug holes with their bayonets in the earth, into which they thrust their heads, stopping the entry and covering their necks with their hammocks, while they lay with their bellies on the ground: to sleep in any other position was absolutely impossible. He himself, by a negro’s advice, climbed to the top of the highest tree he could find, and there slung his hammock among the boughs, and slept exalted nearly a hundred feet above his companions, “whom,” says he, “I could not see for the myriads of mosquitoes below me, nor even hear, from the incessant buzzing of these troublesome insects.”[940] “The Gnats in America,” says Moufet, “do so plash and cut, that they will pierce through very thick clothing; so that it is excellent sport to behold how ridiculously the barbarous people, when they are bitten, will skip and frisk, and slap with their hands their thighs, buttocks, shoulders, arms, and sides, even as a carter doth his horses.”[941] Isaac Weld tells us that “these insects were so powerful and bloodthirsty that they actually pierced through General Washington’s boots.”[942] They probably crept within the boots, but the story is not incredible if we believe Moufet. This naturalist says: “In Italy, near the Po, great store and very great ones are to be seen, terrible for biting, and venomous, piercing through a thrice-doubled stocking, and boots likewise (_morsu crudeles et venenati, triplices caligas, imo ocreas, item perforantes_), sometimes leaving behind them impoysoned, hard, blue tumours, sometimes painful bladders, sometimes itching pimples, such as Hippocrates hath observed in his Epidemics, in the body of one Cyrus, a fuller, being frantic.”[943] The poet Spenser, in his View of Ireland, says the Irish “goe all naked except a mantle, which is a fit house for an outlaw--a meet bed for a rebel--and an apt cloak for a thiefe. It coucheth him strongly against the Gnats, which, in that country, doe more to annoy the naked rebels, and doe more sharply wound them, than all their enemies’ swords and speares, which can seldom come nigh them.” Stewart says that the negroes of Jamaica, who cannot afford mosquito-nets, get into a mechanical habit of driving away these troublesome nocturnal visitors, that even when apparently wrapt in profound sleep, there is a continual movement of the hands.[944]