In the past five years I have seen two specimens at my
country place in central New York, and have heard of a dozen
others. If people understood generally that this rather
ornamental insect is both more perilous to life and health, and
rather more prone to attack human beings, than the
superstitiously dreaded "deadly" copperhead, there would probably
be a heavy mortality in the Latrodectus family at the hands of
energetic house-cleaners.
THE RISE OF THE KISSING-BUG
Years ago the United States Bureau of Entomology received from an
exasperated clergyman in Georgia a dead insect, enclosed in this
note:
"Prof. Riley: What is this devil? He sailed down on my hedge. I
took hold of his lone front leg, and as quick as lightning he
speared me under my thumb nail and I dropped him. My thumb and
whole arm are still paining me . . . "
The miscreant was a fine specimen of Reduvius personatus, the
cone-nosed blood-sucker, soon thereafter to achieve heights of
newspaper notoriety together with its cousin, Melanolestes
picipes, as the "kissing-bug." How many persons died (in type)
from kissing-bug bites in the year of enlightened civilization,
1899, will never be known.
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