When Ray and Willughby were traveling, they found “at Venice and Augsburg Fleas for sale, and at a small price too, decorated with steel or silver collars around their necks, of which Willughby purchased one. When they are kept in a box amongst wool or cloth, in a warm place, and fed once a day, they will live a long time. When they begin to suck they erect themselves almost perpendicularly, thrusting their sucker, which originates in the middle of the forehead, into the skin. The itching is not felt immediately, but a little afterwards. As soon as they are full of blood, they begin to void a portion of it, and thus, if permitted, they will continue for many hours sucking and voiding. After the first itching no uneasiness is subsequently felt. Willughby’s Flea lived for three months by sucking in this manner the blood of his hand; it was at length killed by the cold of winter.”[1023] We read in Purchas’s Pilgrims that a city of the Miantines is said to have been dispeopled by Fleas;[1024] and Messrs. Lewis and Clarke, who found these insects more tormenting than all the other plagues of the Missouri country, say they sometimes here compel even the natives to shift their quarters.[1025] Dr. Clarke was informed by an Arab Sheikh that “the king of the Fleas held his court at Tiberias.”[1026] To prevent Fleas from breeding, Pliny gives the following curious recipe: “Since I have made mention of the cuckow,” says this writer, “there comes into my mind a strange and miraculous matter that the said magicians report of this bird; namely, that if a man, the first time that he heareth her to sing, presently stay his right foot in the very place where it was when he heard her, and withal mark out the point and just proportion of the said foot upon the ground as it stood, and then digg up the earth under it within the said compasse, look what chamber or roume of the house is strewed with the said mould, there will no Fleas bread there.”[1027] Thomas Hill, in his Naturall and Artificiall Conclusions, printed 1650, quotes this passage from Pliny, calling it “A very easie and merry conceit to keep off fleas from your beds or chambers.”[1028] The Hungarian shepherds grease their linen with hogs’ lard, and thus render themselves so disgusting even to the Fleas and Lice, as to put them effectually to flight.[1029] There is still shown in the Arsenal at Stockholm a diminutive piece of ordnance, four or five inches in length, with which, report says, on the authority of Linnæus, the celebrated Queen Christiana used to cannonade Fleas.[1030] But, seriously, if you wish for an effectual remedy, that prescribed by old Tusser, in his Points of Goode Husbandry, in the following lines, will answer your purpose: While wormwood hath seed, get a handfull or twaine, To save against March, to make flea to refraine: Where chamber is sweeped and wormwood is strown, No flea for his life dare abide to be known.