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. But from far and near, from California and Connecticut and the Carolinas, from Minnesota and Maryland and Maine, came startling reports of this hitherto unfamed creature's depredations upon the human countenance. Thereby the spider family was relieved of much unmerited odium, for it is more than suspected by entomologists that a large proportion of so-called spider bites are really the work of the more vicious but less formidable-appearing kissing-bug, as is often evidenced by the nature of the puncture.

   The kissing-bug is about half an inch in length, flat-backed, shaped in geometrically regular angles, and armed with a large, hard beak.............