ura.]

Without farther apology, then, and very dependent on the labors of
others for our information, we will say a few words on some interesting
points in the natural history of lice. In the first place, how does the
louse bite? It is the general opinion among physicians, supported by
able entomologists, that the louse has jaws, and bites. But while the
bird lice (Mallophaga) do have biting jaws, whence the Germans call them
skin-eaters (_pelzfresser_), the mouth parts of the genus Pediculus, or
true louse, resemble in their structure those of the bed-bug (Fig. 110),
and other Hemiptera. In its form the louse closely resembles the
bed-bug, and the two groups of lice, the Pediculi and Mallophaga, should
be considered as families of Hemiptera, though degraded and at the base
of the hemipterous series. The resemblance is carried out in the form of
the egg, the mode of growth of the embryo, and the metamorphosis of the
insect after leaving its egg.

[Illustration: 110. Bed-bug.]

Schioedte, a Danish entomologist, has, it seems to us, forever settled
the question as to whether the louse bites the flesh or sucks blood, and
decides a point interesting to physicians, _i.e._, that the loathsome
disease called phthiriasis is a nonentity. From this source not only
many living in poverty and squalor are said to have died, but also men
of renown, among whom Denny in his work on the Anoplura, or lice, of
Great Britain, mentions the name of "Pheretima, as recorded by
Herodotus, Antiochus Epiphanes, the Dictator Sylla, the two Herods, the
Emperor Maximian, and Phillip the Second." Schioedte, in his essay "On
Phthirius, and on the Structure of the Mouth in Pediculus" (Annals and
Magazine of Natural History, 1866, page 213), says that these statements
will not bear examination, and that this disease should be placed on the
"retired list," for such a malady is impossible to be produced by simply
blood-sucking animals, and that they are only the disgusting attendants
on other diseases. Our author thus describes the mouth parts of the
louse.

"Lice are no doubt to be regarded as bugs, simplified in structure and
lowered in animal life in accordance with their mode of living as
parasites, being small, flattened, apterous, myopic, crawling and
climbing, with a conical head, moulded as it were to suit the rugosities
of the surface they inhabit, provided with a soft, transversely furrowed
skin, probably endowed with an acute sense of feeli