Reviewed by: The Color Line by Igiaba Scego Adele Newson-Horst IGIABA SCEGO The Color Line Trans. John Cullen & Gregory Conti. New York. Other Press. 2022. 544 pages. IGIABA SCEGO'S third novel, The Color Line, is a multilayered adventure. It features two women, more than a century apart, who encounter many of the same struggles despite societal progress. The adventure rests with movement—undertaking a journey—while the effort to occupy space freely is the struggle. The work is nothing less than brilliant. It has everything: a compelling story, a historical lesson, a love story, and an urgent message. Lafanu Brown is a half-Chippewa, half-Haitian artist living in antebellum America. She is discovered by a wealthy society woman who seeks to impress upon the world her magnanimous nature concerning the Negro. From that point forward, Lafanu becomes dependent upon the patronage of white women. She sees Italy as the mecca for artists. The story begins in Rome in 1887, a period historically known as the Scramble for Africa. A newly unified Italy has decided that it would like to "go and win the fatherland a place in the sun," so it embarks upon East Africa. Lafanu at this point is forty-five years old and living as a portrait artist in Italy. The expatriate American is attacked in the Piazza Colonna after word reaches citizens that Italian troops have been massacred in East Africa. In addition to a prologue and an epilogue, the twenty-one sections are designated significantly as "Crossings." Apart from being a compelling read, there is much to unpack in this work. Under the rubric Crossings I, the narrative shifts to the first-person point of view of Leila, a young African (Somali) Italian woman. Her family migrated to Italy to flee the dictatorship. Leila is an art [End Page 77] curator who works to restore Lafanu Brown to her rightful place in history. By turns, Leila conflates the struggles of Lafanu with those of her cousin Bini, who seeks to escape a lawless Mogadishu in the present time. Both Lafanu and Binti are assaulted viciously for the space they chose to occupy, both suffered serious trauma, and both used art as therapy to aid recovery. So the story shifts from the late nineteenth century to the present by turns to tell the story of recovery. This book features a host of memorable characters, including a lustful Frederick Douglass-like character, a lesbian dolente, and nineteenth-century eccentric women. It examines color consciousness in the larger European society. The British characters do not see Italians as Europeans, and Italians see themselves as superior to Africans. Scots and Irish servants are on the bottom of the white socioeconomic scale. The preoccupation with color as a civilizing agent is exhaustive. Above all this is an immigration story—a story of African migration. Binti writes in a letter to Leila, "I'd like to have a world where we Africans have the chance to move around." Restricted by laws, Africans are unable to travel the world like their counterparts in European countries. As for the characters who are successful in their crossings, Bim Adewunmi's assertion is relevant here: "All immigrants live a variation of the biblical act made famous by Lot's wife: They always look back." Adele Newson-Horst Morgan State University Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

The first paper, "The Irish Servants of Barbados, 1657-1661: Illuminations on Subjecthood, Religion, Nationality, and Labor" explores the Irish as subjects within the English Empire and their access to the immunities, rights, and tolerance of other subjects of non-Irish nationality. This paper attempts to demonstrate not only the various ways in which the Irish were conceived as subjects in the early modern English Atlantic but also the ways in which this subjecthood was articulated and deployed in often fluid and haphazard ways. This paper uses colonial Barbados in the late 1650s and early 1660s as a case-study and relies on laws that were passed during this time that relate to labor and to the Irish as well as colonial correspondence between the colony of Barbados and the metropole to illuminate the ways in which ideas and definitions about subjecthood differed and how attitudes in one arena informed attitudes in the other. The second paper, "Moral Dynamite: Support and Opposition for Nationalist Political Violence and Nationalist Activity among Irish-Americans in the 1880s" uses the activities of the Fenian dynamiters as a focus for an exploration of the attitudes regarding nationalist political activity and nationalist violence in the wider Irish-American community in the 1880s. This paper relies on newspaper coverage from a wide variety of secular, religious, middle- and working-class sections of Irish-America to uncover the ways in which the dynamiters were discussed and the ways in which nationalist activity and violence was discussed.

Reviewed by: Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference by Jenny Shaw David M. Stark (bio) Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference JENNY SHAW Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013 259pp. Try to imagine what life was like on a sugar plantation in the seventeenth-century English Caribbean, where African slaves and Irish servants lived and worked together under the watchful eye of English planters. How did they view each other? What were their interactions like? How did they negotiate status and hierarchy? These are important questions because they speak to broader debates about the origins of racism and slavery: the “origins debate” in the English colonies. The long-standing assumption is that difference was based solely on race. With the rise of the sugar plantation economy in the mid-seventeenth century, the need for [End Page 825] labor increased and greater numbers of Africans were brought to English colonies. As this process unfolded, society became racially bifurcated, and labor was used to separate individuals into distinct categories consisting of those who were free (whites) and those who were unfree (blacks). Jenny Shaw challenges this view in her well-written and convincing book Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean. She notes that Africans were not the only (or the first) unfree laborers in the early modern English Atlantic world. Europeans, more specifically Irish Catholic indentured servants, were sometimes used like slaves. In addition, she explores how race was not the only factor that shaped prejudice; religion also played a prominent albeit overlooked role in the construction of difference. Shaw is part of a growing number of scholars who argue that the racial bifurcation model needs to be revised, and she provides a much-needed, more nuanced account of how difference was constructed in the early English Caribbean. The everyday experiences and interactions among Irish servants, African slaves, and English planters contributed to the construction of difference. However, the lack of surviving source material from this period has complicated our understanding of this process. To recover the everyday life of ordinary colonial subjects, Shaw (re)reads traditional sources (plantation records and inventories, wills, deeds, and travelers’ accounts) as much for what they omit as for what they include. Her methodology of focusing on the “presence of absence” allows readers to learn more about marginalized populations who left little (if any) paper trail and who are largely invisible in the historical record. English ideas about difference were initially worked out in Ireland, the site of England’s first imperial project. Through the lens of their own ideas about what constituted civilized behavior, the English perceived Irish cultural practices related to land use, sexual mores, clothing, and religion as barbaric. This became the basis of the perceived inferiority of the Irish. The English would later draw attention to similar cultural practices among Native Americans and Africans as markers of uncivilized peoples. They believed that cultural differences among inferior peoples, such as the Irish, could be overcome if they adopted Protestantism. However, the 1641 Ulster uprising, which devolved into an ethnic conflict between Irish Catholics on one side and English and Scottish Protestants on the other, hardened attitudes toward the Irish. Following the Cromwellian war in England [End Page 826] (1649–53), the English deported about fifty thousand Irish Catholics as indentured laborers, many to the West Indies, and their persecution of Irish Catholics intensified both at home and abroad. By then the English no longer believed the Irish capable of redemption, and religion became the most important cultural marker of difference. This influx of Irish in Barbados and the Leeward Islands coincided with the rise of the sugar plantation economy across the English Caribbean. To meet the increased need for labor, English plantation owners imported large numbers of African slaves. Before long Irish servants and African slaves outnumbered English colonists, prompting concerns about the destabilizing potential of subjugated populations. Colonial authorities found it necessary to identify and count disruptive populations, as the English had done in Ireland with the Down Survey in 1652. English authorities attempted to minimize—in their minds, at least—the threat holding people...

A New Insight Into Edmund Tyrone by Way of the Second Girl

The popularity of stories about Irish domestics in nineteenth-century American women’s magazines reveals much about the functions of such stories as well as the complicated relationship between Irish domestic workers and their American employers. The arrival of so many young, typically unmarried Irish immigrant women coincided with the rapid growth of the American middle class to create “Biddy,” the stock Irish servant character in the American literary imagination. While the status of real Irish women and their place in the larger American landscape changed throughout the century, Biddy was a persistent and remarkably static figure in women’s magazine fiction, suggesting that the character functioned in ways that were not directly tied to the socioeconomic status of the Irish as a minority group. Women’s magazine fiction suggests that the relative proximity of Irish women—and the resultant interconnectedness of the lives of Irish servants and their employers—proved a source of deep anxiety among American women. Indeed, stories about Irish servants in women’s magazines reveal much about the uncertainty of each woman’s function, not just in the household but in the broader American culture.

Domestic servants are widely recognised as prime ‘others’ to white, middle-class male English householders in the later nineteenth century. However the symbolic role of the racialised identities of Irish women who were domestic servants in constructing the boundaries of white middle-class English masculinity is often overlooked. This study uses both qualitative and quantitative sources to explore the presence and significance of Irish servants in English households. It examines ways in which both contemporary and present-day fiction can begin to embody women whose lives are missing from historical records. New data from a 5% sample of the 1881 census provides more concrete statistical evidence about the size and demographic characteristics of the Irish servant population, and their social relationships within middle-class English households. Details from the London sample show that although numbers were still quite small, Irish servants had distinctive profiles. Census statistics confirm close daily contact between English middle-class children and women whose religious faith and national affiliation were strikingly at odds with their employers' cultural and political values. Yet despite being placed at the heart of English society, the identities of Irish domestic servants have remained largely unrecognised, in contrast to the high visibility of ‘Bridgets’ in the United States.

Transgressive Women, Transworld Women

This article examines the cross-cultural and cross-class experiences recorded in Emily Dickinson's writings about two women with whom she had contact despite her extremely reclusive lifestyle. One of the women, domestic servant, Margaret Maher, an Irish worker who served in the Dickinson home for thirty years, also left written accounts. Her writing about Dickinson and the working conditions she experienced within the Dickinson household will make possible an understanding of the relationship between mistress and servant. The conditions faced by nineteenth-century domestics illustrate the difficulties and opportunities presented to women in a society that demanded their labour yet refused to grant them status. Maggie Maher's position reflected the situation of many competent Irish servants in New England households. Her devoted service provided significant assistance to Dickinson's literary work, as well as primary source material about the daily life of New England gentry.

RELINQUISHING AND RECLAIMING INDEPENDENCE: IRISH DOMESTIC SERVANTS, AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS MISTRESSES, AND ASSIMILATION, 1850–1920 DIANE M. HOTTEN-SOMERS between the onset of the Great Famine and the restriction of immigration in the 1920s, some five million Irish people emigrated to North America. Roughly half of these emigrants were female, and most were young and single.1 In America’s rapidly developing industrial society Irish women, even more than Irish men, were highly employable.2 For women of the newly emerging American middle class, employing a servant became a badge of respectability and class legitimacy. No longer directly engaged in the production of wealth, these women were becoming increasingly involved in consuming it instead; and to be active as consumers and members of the public sphere they needed surrogates to run their households. The flood of Irish immigrant women readily met this demand. And because most Irish female immigrants arrived impoverished, unskilled, and single—and were apparently unaffected by the social stigma attached to domestic service—they eagerly accepted the opportunity to work in service . Thus by the turn of the century the Irish “Bridget” had become an integral part of the middle-class American home.3 SERVANTS, MISTRESSES, AND ASSIMILATION, 1850–1920 185 1 Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), especially Chapters 7 and 8; Kevin Kenny, The American Irish: A History (London and New York: Longman, 2000), especially Chapters 3, 4, and 5. 2 Hasia R. Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 83–85. 3 During this same time that Irish women emigrated to America, so too did German, Scandinavian, Italian, and Eastern European women. However, this article concentrates on Irish domestic servants precisely because Irish women seemed to pay no mind to the fact that becoming a servant implied being of the lower class; they simply wanted to find work that paid high wages. The other immigrant groups, especially Italian and Jewish women, Many historians have interpreted the Irish woman’s emigration to America and her work in domestic service as a liberating experience. Both Hasia Diner and Janet Nolan, for example, emphasize the newfound autonomy of young Irish women in the US.4 While Nolan focuses her argument on the idea that through emigrating and working within America, Irish women hoped to “regain the freedom that women had had in pre-Famine Ireland,” Diner concentrates on showing that Irish women’s emigration to America was an exercise in “cultural persistence,” freeing young women to express themselves once they had escaped abroad.5 Thus, while domestic service certainly carried some disadvantages , the consensus is that it was certainly an improvement over Ireland, and that, from the secure setting of the middle-class household, the young women involved could carve out for themselves and for their children a better life in America. While this interpretation does discuss the nature of domestic work at some length, it does not adequately consider how Irish women’s “working ” relationships with their American middle-class mistresses shaped their immigrant experience. The Irish servant and the American mistress are SERVANTS, MISTRESSES, AND ASSIMILATION, 1850–1920 186 refused to enter domestic service, mainly because they emigrated either as married women or as part of a strong patriarchal family, and also (perhaps) because they shared with American -born women a sense of the stigma attached to domestic service. The only other groups of women heavily concentrated in domestic service were African-Americans and Swedish immigrants. For further discussion of this topic, see Diner, Erin’s Daughters, 82–83; David M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 271–73; and the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union (hereafter WEIU) investigations of the nationality of domestic servants at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass. 4 Diner, Erin’s Daughters, 80–94, and Janet A. Nolan, Ourselves Alone: Women’s Emigration from Ireland, 1885–1920 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989), 73–90. Other scholars, such as Maureen Murphy and Ruth-Ann Harris, argue in...

Kitchen Testimony: Ex-Slaves’ Narratives in New Company Barbara Ryan (bio) A talkative servant is never considered a desirable inmate in any family. (1855) 1 In 1850, a correspondent to the pro-slavery New York Herald had a complaint. Aware, along with most of the nation, of the widely reported divorce suits of the nation’s foremost Shakespearean actor and his allegedly wild wife, the letter-writer questioned the merit of putting Edwin and Catherine Forrest’s domestic servants on the witness stand. “It seems to me to be unjust,” this onlooker commented, and improper, and unreasonable to believe imputations against any respectable woman, of gross misconduct, such as vulgarity or drunkenness, to say nothing of worse charges or insinuations, upon the mere belief and unexplained statement of . . . such witnesses as those relied on in this case. An ignorant housekeeper, and an equally ignorant Irish man servant, are not exactly the persons whose construction should govern us in estimating the conduct of their superiors. 2 The kicker to this haughty assertion lies in its tail for, according to “An American,” servant-witnesses should be inadmissible in court “even though they may speak the truth, and testify under no improper influence.” Nothing about this charge admits that quite a few servant-witnesses had been testifying in print and lecture-halls in recent years because “An American” ignored writers like Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown (to name only the most acclaimed). Ten years later, a pro-slavery novelist did acknowledge the accounts of former and fugitive chattel, but wondered why any sensible person would listen to menials’ complaints. In what looks like a direct reference to the Forrest trial, she scoffed that Carolina readers knew better than to credit Irish servants who claimed to have witnessed immorality. No more, she thought, should “civilized, educated Abolitionists . . . be so daft as to believe the monstrosities fulminated by lying runaway negroes, against their masters.” 3 These comments remind literary and cultural historians that in addition to race-based resistance, ex-slaves’ narratives were subject to a class-based fear, and that both class and race inflect the notorious complaint that “the slave as a general thing, is a [End Page 141] liar.” 4 Class and race also mingle in the term “testimony . . . from the kitchen,” which was coined by one of Catherine Forrest’s alleged lovers, a man with reason to fear what servants might say. 5 With this essay, I want to emphasize the fact that many ex-slave narrators had been house staff at some point, to draw their life-stories closer to accounts of waged service like Louisa May Alcott’s “How I Went Out to Service” (1874) and the housekeeper’s memoir published as A Lifetime with Mark Twain (1925). As this conflation of separable categories runs counter to some familiar patterns of thought, I will first outline the reasons that ex-slaves’ narratives could look like kitchen testimony to 19th-century homemakers trying to defend a rank-perquisite they held dear. I then survey several 19th-century servant-writers to illuminate the strategies they used when venturing into public speech. I conclude with a few thoughts on the boons I see for inquiries about ex-slaves’ narratives as a subset of the broader category of accounts written by people whose claim for attention rested on the fact that they had served. My inspiration throughout is the non-slave servant-writers forced to negotiate many of the same obstacles that former and fugitive slaves encountered when they tried to enter print. 6 A few of these writers are known and esteemed, most notably Alcott and Harriet Wilson, while others are still obscure, like Eliza M. Potter and Kate Leary. In bringing these servant-writers alongside ex-slave narrators like Douglass, Harriet Jacobs and Elizabeth Keckley, I do not follow the antebellum pundit who opined: “[t]he words slave and servant are perfectly synonymous” or even David Walker’s charge that “a servant is a slave to the man whom he serves.” 7 I contend, instead, that if ex-slave narrators were forced to “run a gauntlet of critics . . . hindered, if not obstructed, by the surveillance of both friend and foe...

The Wood’s Halfpence affair has long been recognised as one of the most serious disputes to have occurred between the Irish and British political establishments during the eighteenth century. There is no doubt that the conflict — caused by Irish resentment over the patent granted to William Wood to coin copper halfpence for Ireland — was one of the most serious ruptures in Anglo-Irish relations between the Williamite war and the ‘patriot’ campaign of the 1750s. The simple fact is that in 1723–4 the British administration was unable to implement its policy in Ireland. The Irish parliamentary managers declined to co-operate in the implementation of Wood’s patent, the Irish privy council failed to offer advice about how the conflict might be resolved, and the Irish lords justices refused to obey the positive orders of the British government.In the past historians have argued that, shocked by the demonstrable unreliability of its Irish servants during this episode, the British government adopted a systematic policy of appointing English officials to the highest offices of Irish state and church. The appointment of Hugh Boulter as primate of the Church of Ireland in 1724 and of Richard West as lord chancellor in 1725 seemed to support such an interpretation.

PUTTING DOWN THE REBELLION: NOTES AND GLOSSES ON CASTLE RACKRENT, 1800 KATHRYN KIRKPATRICK introducing his Oxford edition of Castle Rackrent, George Watson argues that Maria Edgeworth wrote the Wrst half of her novel in the mid-1790s. This dating of the early stages of composition, now generally accepted, is for Watson evidence which “usefully destroys the myth that Rackrent is a novel occasioned by the rebellion of 1798.”1 Here Watson invokes the same static relationship between Edgeworth and her sociopolitical environment that he had apparently sought to dismiss. The Irish Rebellion of 1798 was not a self-contained, isolated incident, but rather the culmination of a decade of political turmoil and rural disturbance with which, well before 1798, Maria Edgeworth was more than passingly familiar. To say that Castle Rackrent was not “occasioned” by the events of 1798 is thus to formulate the issue of writer and context in a falsely dichotomized way. Unlike their anxious counterparts among the English gentry, Edgeworth and her Anglo-Irish family were faced with more than rumors of revolution in the 1790s. Throughout the decade, the frustrations of small farmers, cottiers, and laborers found a voice in Defenderism, which was openly anti-Protestant, anti-English and anti-settler.2 Yet, this period of political crisis formed an oddly liberating context for Edgeworth as a writer. Until that time, most of Edgeworth’s writing had been inXuenced by her father, and had taken the form of educational works and instructive children ’s stories. Richard Edgeworth’s preoccupation with the threat of imminent invasion and his frequent absence from the Edgeworth estate in NOTES AND GLOSSES ON CASTLE RACKRENT, 1800 77 1 George Watson, Introduction to Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. xxi. 2 For more on Defenderism, see Thomas Bartlett, “Select Documents XXXVIII: Defenders and Defenderism in 1795,” Irish Historical Studies, 24 (1985), 373-380. County Longford during the latter half of the 1790s created an environment in which Edgeworth wrote without his supervision and produced her Wrst novel, Castle Rackrent. Edgeworth’s work was thus marked by the ebb and Xow of patriarchal control during this period, both within and outside her household. Consequently, in Castle Rackrent the voices vying to articulate the issue of Irish national identity during the 1790s emerge correspondent to Edgeworth’s own struggles for an independent authorial voice. In examining Edgeworth’s narrative, it is important to keep in mind Mary Poovey’s formulation of writing as an imaginative and symbolic response . During this period, the rhetorical strategies employed by women writers suggest a kind of double consciousness: Within the domain of literature, nearly every woman who wrote was able to internalize a self-concept at least temporarily at odds with the norm. . . . [T]he legacy of this period is a repertoire of the strategies that enabled women either to conceive of themselves in two apparently incompatible ways or to express themselves in a code capable of being read in two ways: as acquiescence to the norm and departure from it.3 The multiple frames and competing voices of Castle Rackrent provide a good example of this kind of symbolic response to the contradictions of female authorship. Castle Rackrent is eVectively a polyphonic narrative: in addition to the narrative proper, told in Wrst person by the Irish servant Thady and containing its own explanatory footnotes, the novel is framed by a preface and postscript written by the “Editor”; this “Editor,” who is referred to in the text as “he,” is also the implied author of the extensive glossary which interrupts the narrative no fewer than twenty-one times. The history of this layered narrative is complicated as well. According to Marilyn Butler, the Wrst half of the text proper was written by Edgeworth in the mid-1790s, probably between 1794 and 1795. The last half was written “in the years 1796-8, when Ireland’s endemic local unrest became politicized, and far more threatening to an England at war with revolutionary France.”4 Fearing the novel’s implications in this dicey political climate, Edgeworth’s family and friends urged her to qualify and dilute her essentially radical narrative with the last minute...

the beginning of a critical phase during the second half of the eighteenth century. The demographic expansion brought with it the ancient threat of food shortages, widespread hunger, and occasionally even famine. That the population would actually be able to break out of the partial homeostatic equilibrium that had prevailed since time immemorial was not at all clear. During the last similar episode of rapid growth in the sixteenth century it had not yet been able to do So.2 However, this time was to be different: a general subsistence crisis of major proportions was ultimately avoided.3 Much progress had been made during the previous century and a half in practically all branches of the economy, including transport, agriculture, and technology.4 New sources of food imports had become available, and previously unknown foods had been introduced from the New World. Merchants were wealthier, and governments were better organized. All these factors, and others too, helped Europeans break through the Malthusian ceiling. Population growth, and therefore economic activity, could continue, freed from the limitations imposed until then by the supply of nutrients.5 The industrial revolution was under way.6 Thus, in the eighteenth century the age-old contest between population expansion and food supply was ultimately decided in the latter's favour. Yet malnutrition became widespread, even endemic, during the course of the century. As a consequence, the lower classes suffered a diminution in their nutritional status. The notion of a general decline in food consumption

A Malthusian Episode Revisited: The Height of British and Irish Servants in Colonial America

Irish footmen first appeared in Elizabethan drama as barely Anglicized exotics with a certain tragic dignity. However, as the Irish servant became a more familiar figure, a change in his depiction occurred. Teague in Howard's The Committee (1662) established the new comic prototype of the loyal but inept servant. The endless succession of incompetent Teagues that followed encouraged a condescending attitude toward the Irish, who were depicted as incapable of running their own lives, let alone their own country.

MAY I beg to add a few lines to the very interesting correspondence and discussion regarding the immunity of man from insect-stings and snake-bites after successive inoculations. The letter of Dr. Dawson Williams, in NATURE of March 4, calls attention to a certain degree of immunity which obtains among the Norwegians from the stings of the myg, a kind of gnat (probably our midge, Anglo-Saxon mygge). His statements in regard to the degree of immunity varying in different individuals, is quite in accordance with our experience with the mosquito. His pathological description of the effects of the sting of the Norwegian myg would apply most accurately to the sting of the mosquito. We also become more or less immuned from the mosquito poison after much suffering in childhood. The swelling resulting from the mosquito sting will often close the eyes of an infant. In middle age the sting is hardly noticeable. English and Irish people, upon first coming to this country, suffer beyond measure, and often come under the care of a surgeon. It is a curious yet painful sight to see a brawny Englishman presenting the appearance of our young infants under the infliction of these pests. I have two Irish servants, who have been in this country two and seven years respectively. They both tell me that the mosquito bite, as it is called, no longer troubles them, though they were eloquent in the descriptions of their acute sufferings at the outset. More than a quarter of a century ago Dr. J. C. White, a distinguished dermatologist, of Boston, in a communication to the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, November 9, 1871, discusses the subject fully in a paper entitled, “On the protection acquired by the human skin and other tissues against the action of certain poisons after repeated inoculation.” He not only shows the immunity arising from the repeated stings of mosquitos, but notices a like immunity arising from the domestic pests, Pediculus, Cimex and Pulex. An American recalls his first experiences with the flea in Europe with the same horror that an Englishman remembers the welcome he received from the mosquito in America.

REFERRING to the above, as recorded by Dr., George Dawson, F. R. S., in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, and included in your Notes of last issue, in which attention is called to the belief among the Shuswaps and some other North American races, that small lizards enter the bodies of men, pursuing them, and devouring their hearts, I was at once struck with the almost exact resemblance of this belief to one very generally prevailing in Ireland, as regards common water Newts, which go by the name of Man-eaters (pronounced Man-aters). This I can testify to from personal knowledge; but it has been accidentally confirmed by an experiment which I hope I may be pardoned for referring to. Where I reside are three Irish servants, to whom I caused to be shown a drawing of the Water Newt, and with the request that I might be told its name, and anything they knew about it One of these, a Galway woman, speaking Irish better than English, gave me the name in her language (which I won't attempt to transcribe, for it was a very long one), and also said that the animals were well known to jump down people's throats to their certain de struction.