the ordinary fly,
constituted the plague inflicted upon Pharaoh and the Egyptians.[2]

[Footnote 1: _Culex laniger?_ Wied. In Kandy Mr. Thwaites finds _C.
fuscanns, C. circumcolans,_ &c., and one with a most formidable hooked
proboscis, to which he has assigned the appropriate name _C. Regius_.]

[Footnote 2: The precise species of insect by means of which the
Almighty signalised the plague of flies, remains uncertain, as the
Hebrew term _arob_ or _oror_ which has been rendered in one place.
"Divers sorts of flies," Ps. cv. 31; and in another, "swarms of flies,"
Exod. viii. 21, &c., means merely "an assemblage." a "mixture" or a
"swarm," and the expletive. "_of flies_" is an interpolation of the
translators. This, however, serves to show that the fly implied was one
easily recognisable by its habit of _swarming_; and the further fact
that it _bites_, or rather stings, is elicited from the expression of
the Psalmist, Ps. lxxviii. 45, that the insects by which the Egyptians
were tormented "devoured them," so that here are two peculiarities
inapplicable to the domestic fly, but strongly characteristic of gnats
and mosquitoes.

Bruce thought that the fly of the fourth plague was the "zimb" of
Abyssinia which he so graphically describes: and WESTWOOD, in an
ingenious passage in his _Entomologist's Text-book._ p. 17, combats the
strange idea of one of the bishops, that it was a cockroach! and argues
in favour of the mosquito. This view he sustains by a reference to the
habits of the creature, the swarms in which it invades a locality, and
the audacity with which it enters the houses; and he accounts for the
exemption of "the land of Goshen in which the Israelites dwelt," by the
fact of its being sandy pasture above the level of the river; whilst the
mosquitoes were produced freely in the rest of Egypt, the soil of which
was submerged by the rising of the Nile.

In all the passages in the Old Testament in which flies are alluded to,
otherwise than in connection with the Egyptian infliction, the word used
in the Hebrew is _zevor_, which the Septuagint renders by the ordinary
generic term for flies in general, [Greek: muia], "_musca_" (Eccles. x.
1, Isaiah vii. 10); but in every instance in which mention is made of
the miracle of Moses, the Septuagint says that the fly produced was the
[Greek: kunomyia], the "dog-fly." What insect was meant by this name it
is not now easy to determine, but AELIAN intimates that the dogfly bo