Thomas Hill, in his Naturall and Artificiall Conclusions, printed 1650, quotes this passage from Pliny, calling it "A very easie and merry conceit to keep off fleas from your beds or chambers."
The Hungarian shepherds grease their linen with hogs' lard, and thus render themselves so disgusting even to the Fleas and Lice, as to put them effectually to flight.
There is still shown in the Arsenal at Stockholm a diminutive piece of ordnance, four or five inches in length, with which, report says, on the authority of Linnaeus, the celebrated Queen Christiana used to cannonade Fleas.
But, seriously, if you wish for an effectual remedy, that prescribed by old Tusser, in his Points of Goode Husbandry, in the following lines, will answer your purpose:
While wormwood hath seed, get a handfull or twaine, To save against March, to make flea to refraine; Where chamber is sweeped and wormwood is strown, No flea for his life dare abide to be known.
The inhabitants of Dalecarlia place the skins of hares in their apartments, in which the Fleas willingly take refuge, so that they are easily destroyed by the immersion of the skin in scalding water.
Pamphilius among others gives the following remedies against Fleas: If a person, he says, sets a dish in the middle of the house, and draws a line around it with an iron sword (it will be better if the sword has done execution), and if he sprinkles the rest of the house, excepting the place circumscribed, with an irrigation of staphisagria, or of powdered leaves of the bay-tree, they having been boiled in brine or in sea-water, he will bring all the Fleas together into the dish. A jar also being set in the ground with its edge even with the pavement, and smeared with bulls' fat, will attract all the Fleas, even those that are in the wardrobe. If you enter a place where there are Fleas, express the usual exclamation of distress, and they will not touch you. Make a small trench under a bed, and pour goats' blood into it, and it will bring all the Fleas together, and it will allure those from your clothing. Fleas may be removed also, concludes this writer, from the most villous and from the thickest pieces of tapestry, whither they betake themselves when full, if goats' blood is set in a vessel or in a cork.
Moufet says: "A Glowworm, set in the middle of the house, drives away Fleas."
On the subject of destroying Fleas, the following pleasant piece of satire, by Poor Humphrey, will be read with a smile: "A notable projector became notable by one project only, which was a certain specific for the killing of fleas, and it was in form of a powder, and sold in papers, with plain directions for use, as followeth: The flea was to be held conveniently between the thumb and finger of the left hand and to the end of the trunk or proboscis, which protrudeth in the flea, somewhat as the elephant's doth, a very small quantity of the powder was to be put from between the thumb and finger of the right hand. And the deviser undertook, if any flea to whom his powder was so administered should prove to have afterwards bitten a purchaser who used it, then that purchaser should have another paper of the said powder gratis. And it chanced that the first paper thereof was bought idly, as it were, by an old woman, and she, without meaning to injure the inventor, or his remedy, but, of her mere harmlessness, did innocently ask him, whether, when she had caught the flea, and after she had got it, as before described, if she should kill it with her nail it would not be as well. Whereupon the ingenious inventor was so astonished by the question, that, not knowing what to answer on the sudden occasion, he said with truth to this effect, that without doubt her way would do, too. And according to the belief of Poor Humphrey, there is not as yet any device more certain or better for destroying a flea, when thou hast captured him, than the ancient manner of the old woman's, or instead thereof, the drowning of him in fair water, if thou hast it by thee at the time."
The old English hunters report that foxes are full of Fleas, and they tell the following queer story how they get rid of them: "The fox," say they, as recorded by Moufet, "gathers some handfuls of wool from thorns and briars, and wrapping it up, he holds it fast in his mouth, then goes by degrees into a cold river, and dipping himself close by little and little, when he finds that all the Fleas are crept so high as his head for fear of drowning, and so for shelter crept into the wool, he barks and spits out the wool, full of Fleas, and so very froliquely being delivered from their molestation, he swims to land."
Ramsay thus alludes to this story:
Then sure the lasses, and ilk gaping coof, Wad rin about him, and had out their loof. M. As fast as fleas skip to the tale of woo, Whilk slee Tod Lowrie (the fox) hads without his mow, When he to drown them, and his hips to cool, In summer days slides backward in a pool.
Preceding this story, Mouffet makes the following observations: "The lesser, leaner, and younger they are, the sharper they bite, the fat ones being more inclined to tickle and play; and then are not the least plague, especially when in greater numbers, since they molest men that are sleeping, and trouble wearied and sick persons; from whom they escape by skipping; for as soon as they find they are arraigned to die, and feel the finger coming, on a sudden they are gone, and leap here and there, and so escape the danger; but so soon as day breaks, they forsake the bed. They then creep into the rough blankets, or hide themselves in rushes and dust, lying in ambush for pigeons, hens, and other birds, also for men and dogs, moles and mice, and vex such as passe by."
It is frequently affirmed that asses are never troubled with Fleas or other vermin; and, among the superstitious, it is said that it is all owing to the riding of Christ upon one of these animals.
Willsford, in his Nature's Secrets, printed 1658, p. 130, says: "The little sable beast (called a Flea), if much thirsting after blood, it argues rain."
It is related that the Devil, teasing St. Domingo in the shape of a Flea, skipped upon his book, when the saint fixed him as a mark where he left off, and continued to use him so through the volume.
Fleas infesting beds were attributed to the envy of the Devil.
Giles Fletcher says that Iwan Vasilowich sent to the City of Moscow to provide for him a measure full of Fleas for a medicine. They answered that it was impossible, and if they could get them, yet they could not measure them because of their leaping out. Upon which he set a mulct upon the city of seven thousand rubles.
We read in Purchas's Pilgrims that the Jews were not permitted to burn Fleas in the flame of their lamps on Sabbath evenings.
The muscular power of the Flea is so great that it can leap to the distance of two hundred times its own length, which will appear the more surprising when we consider that a man, were he endowed with equal strength and agility, would be able to leap between three and four hundred yards. Aristophanes, in his usual licentious way, ridicules the great Socrates for his pretended experiments on this great muscular power:
A Flea, Having bit Cherephon's forehead, from thence Leapt upon Socrates' head. How did he measure it? Most cleverly: He melted some wax, and then took the Flea, And dipped its two feet into the wax; Which, when it became cold, was a pair of Persian slippers. These he took off, and with them measured the distance.
The witty Butler has also commemorated the same circumstance in his justly celebrated poem of Hudibras:
How many scores a Flea will jump Of his own length, from head to rump; Which Socrates and Chaerephon In vain assay'd so long agon.
As illustrative of the strength of the Flea, the following facts may also be given: We read in a note to Purchas's Pilgrims that "one Marke Scaliot, in London, made a lock and key and chain of forty-three links, all which a Flea did draw, and weighed but a grain and a half." Moufet, who also records this fact, says he had heard of another Flea that was harnessed to a golden chariot, which it drew with the greatest ease. Bingley tells us that Mr. Boverick, an ingenious watchmaker in the Strand, exhibited some years ago a little ivory chaise with four wheels, and all its proper apparatus, and the figure of a man sitting on the box, all of which were drawn by a single Flea. The same mechanic afterward constructed a minute landau, which opened and shut by springs, with the figures of six horses harnessed to it, and of a coachman on the box, a dog between his legs, four persons inside, two footmen behind it, and a postillion riding on one of the fore horses, which were all easily dragged along by a single Flea. He likewise had a chain of brass, about two inches long, containing two hundred links, with a hook at one end and a padlock and key at the other, which a Flea drew nimbly along. At a fair of Charlton, in Kent, 1830, a man exhibited three Fleas harnessed to a carriage in form of an omnibus, at least fifty times their own bulk, which they pulled along with great ease; another pair drew a chariot, and a single Flea a brass cannon. The exhibitor showed the whole first through a magnifying glass, and then to the naked eye; so that all were satisfied there was no deception. Latreille also mentions a Flea of a moderate size, which dragged a silver cannon, mounted on wheels, that was twenty-four times its own weight, and which being charged with gunpowder was fired off without the Flea appearing in the least alarmed.
It is recorded in Purchas's Pilgrims that an Egyptian artisan received a garment of cloth of gold for binding a Flea in a chain.
The Flea is twice mentioned in the Bible, and in both cases David, in speaking to Saul, applies it to himself as a term of humility.
A Prussian poet, quoted by Jaeger, gives us the song of a young Flea who had emigrated to this country from Prussia, and thus expresses his dissatisfaction to his sweetheart:
Kennst du nunmehr das Land, wo Dorngestripp und Disteln blüh'n, Im frost'gen Wald nur ekelhafte Tannenzapfen glüh'n, Der Schierling tief, und hoch der Sumach steht, Ein rauher Wind vom schwarzen Himmel weht; Kennst du es wohl? lass uns eilig zieh'n, Und schnell zurück in unsre Heimath flieh'n!
An English prose translation of which is: "Know'st thou now this country, where only briars and thistles bloom; where ugly fur-nuts only glow in the icy forest; where down in the vale the fetid hemlock grows, and on the hills the poisonous sumach; where heavy winds blow from black clouds over desolate lands? Dost thou not know of this country? Oh, then, let us fly in haste and return to our own fatherland!"
"To send one away with a Flea in his ear," is a very old English phrase, meaning to dismiss one with a rebuke. "Flea-luggit" is the Scottish — to be unsettled or confused.
There is a collection of poems called "La Puce des grands jours de Poitiers" — the Flea of the carnival of Poitiers. The poems were begun by the learned Pasquier, who edited the collection, upon a Flea which was found one morning in the bosom of the famous Catherine des Roches.