The small bees of the size of gnats were the most tormenting of all the species; we became acquainted with four. They are of the Mellipona. To read, write, or eat required the devoted services of an attendant to drive them away. The eyes were their favourite points of attack; but the ears and nostrils also were sensitive objects to which they invariably reverted. The donkeys’ legs were stripped bare of hair, because of these pests. The death of one left an odour of bitter almonds on the hand. The beetles, again, varied from the size of a monstrous two-and-a-half inches in length to an insect that would have bored through the eye of a tailor’s needle. This last when examined through a magnifying glass seemed to be efficiently equipped for troubling humanity. It burrowed into the skin. It could not be discovered by the eyes unless attention was directed by giving a cross rub with the hand, when a pain like the prick of a pin was felt. The natives’ huts were infested with three peculiar species. One burrowed into one’s body, another bored into the rafters and dropped fine sawdust into the soup, another explored among the crisp leaves of the roof and gave one a creeping fear that there were snakes about; a fourth, which was a roaring lion of a beetle, waited until night and then made it impossible to keep a candle lit for a quiet pipe and meditation. [Sidenote: 1888. Dec. Forest.] Among the minor unpleasantnesses which we had to endure we may mention the “jigger,” which deposited its eggs under the toenails of the most active men, but which attacked the body of a “goee-goee” and made him a mass of living corruption; the little beetle that dived underneath the skin and pricked one as with a needle; the mellipona bee, that troubled the eyes, and made one almost frantic some days; the small and large ticks that insidiously sucked one’s small store of blood; the wasps, which stung one into a raging fever if some careless idiot touched the tree, or shouted near their haunts; the wild honey-bees, which one day scattered two canoe crews, and punished them so that we had to send a detachment of men to rescue them; the tiger-slug, that dropped from the branches and left his poisonous fur in the pores of the body until one raved from the pain; the red ants, that invaded the camp by night and disturbed our sleep, and attacked the caravan half a score of times on the march, and made the men run faster than if pursued by so many pigmies; the black ants, which infested the trumpet tree, and dropped on us when passing underneath, and gave us all a foretaste of the Inferno; the small ants that invaded every particle of food, which required great care lest we might swallow half a dozen inadvertently, and have the stomach membranes perforated or blistered--small as they were, they were the most troublesome, for in every tunnel made through the bush thousands of them housed themselves upon us, and so bit and stung us