ally near the sea, attaching itself, however, on the first opportunity to the bodies of human beings, hares, dogs, cats, and other mammals, and even insects. On reaching the skin, it rapidly burrows deeply into it, causing a painful itching, followed by a swelling of irritation and size varying with the individuals attacked, and enduring for several days. It is usually at the end of July or in August that these mites make their appearance; and the frequency with which they attach themselves to the lower extremities of people walking in fields at harvest time has given rise to their trivial name. The effect of their subcutaneous presence varies in different people, as above mentioned; in some it assumes so intensely painful an aspect as to originate a disease called autumnal erythrema., Such severity of symptoms is generally found in warmer climates than that of Great Britain; the mite however is plentiful, and causes much annoyance, in Scotland. Extraction with a fine needle, under a magnifying power, is the best way to get rid of the pests; but the application of a solution of carbolic acid, benzine, sulphur ointment, or any other powerful and easily diffused insecticide agent will usually soon destroy them.
The scientific name of this creature is Acarus (Leptus or Tetranychus) autumnalis, and in France it has received various common names, that of "rouget" being the best known. It has been placed in different genera by modern authors, who have hitherto considered it as a fully developed form, of somewhat doubtful affinities. The old naturalist Degeer appears to have suspected its correct status as an imperfect Acarus; but it has been reserved for the French naturalist, M. P. Mégnin, to prove from actual observation the fact that it is only the larva of a well-known mite, Trombidium holosericcum, a silky bright scarlet species often found in spring and early summer in gardens and fields. This distinguished biologist has in like manner put beyond doubt the identity of various other members of the Acaridea, hitherto dissociated. In April he found both sexes of the perfect mite, but at the end of May and in June only gravid females occurred. These in June and July deposited their eggs, from which was hatched the creature heretofore known as Acarus (or Leptus) autumnalis. As soon as this has implanted its mandibles into the skin of the individual attacked, its abdomen dilates perceptibly, finally becoming about five times as large as on leaving the egg, though the cephalothorax and limbs remain unchanged. It turns to an octopod nymph, or pupa; and after hibernation, during which the nutritive fluids imbibed in the parasitic stage are assimilated, the adult stage of a purely phytophagous Trombidium, capable of reproduction, is reached.
There seems every reason to believe that the skin irritation caused in Mexico by a supposed insect, called Thalsahuate or Tlulsahuate by the Indians, is really produced by this or a closely allied mite. Similar complaints are apparently caused by mites in Brazil, Martinique, Honduras, &c.; and the symptoms are naturally aggravated in such tropical localities.
An account, with figures, of all the stages of Trombidium holosericcum and the allied T. fuliginosum (of which the octopod T. phalangii, parasitic upon very long-legged spiders, is the nymph or pupa) will be found in the Annales des Sciences Naturelles, 6me série, iii. (1876), article No. 5, by M. Mégnin.
HARVEY, Gabriel (1545–1630), an English writer of the Elizabethan period, was the eldest son of a rope-maker at Saffron Walden, and received his education at Christ's College and Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, where we find him about 1576–78 lecturing on rhetoric. Immediately afterwards he appears to have been sent abroad by his patron the earl of Leicester, to whom he refers in his Gratulationum Waldenensium libri quatuor (Lond., 1578), a collection of pieces in honour of the queen's visit to Audley End, near his native town. In 1585 he became doctor of laws. Though Harvey expresses a desire to be "epitaphed the Inventoar of the English Hexameter," his name, familiar enough to his more learned contemporaries, would probably have been well nigh forgotten had it not been for his friendship with Spenser and his hostilities with Greene and Nash. To the student of Spenser he is familiar as one of the poet's principal correspondents, and as the Hobbinol who wrote the poem prefixed to the "Faerie Queen." His quarrel with Greene and Nash was begun by Greene alluding in his Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592) to the fact that Harvey was the son of a rope-maker; and after Greene's death it raged with ever increasing violence until the archbishop of Canterbury issued an order for the seizure of all works written by either of the combatants.
Harvey's extant publications, which contain many minor matters of interest to the student of literature, are—Ciceronianus, London, H. Binnemann, 1577; Rhetor, vel duorum dierum Oratio de Natura, Arte, et Exercitatione Rhetorica, 1577; Smithus vel Musarum Lachrymæ, Lond., 1578, in honour of the scholarly Sir Thomas Smith; Foure Letters and certaine Sonnets, especially touching Robert Greene and other parties by him abused, 1592; Pierce's Supererogation, or a new Prayse of the Old Asse, 1598, reprinted, but inaccurately, by Mr Collier, 4to, 1868; A new Letter of Notable Contents, 1593; The Trimming of Thomas Nash, Gentleman, by the high tituled Don Richardo de Medico Campo, 1597, reprinted in The Old Book Collector's Miscellany, Lond., 1871. See Warton's History of English Poetry, Hazlitt's edition, and J. P. Collier's Bibliographical and Critical Account of the Rarest Books in the English Language, Lond., 1865, under "Harvey," "Nash," and "Greene."
HARVEY, Sir George (1806–1876), a Scottish painter and president of the Royal Scottish Academy, was the son of a watchmaker, and was born at St Ninians, near Stirling, in February 1806. Soon after his birth his parents remove to Stirling, where George was apprenticed to a bookseller. His love for art having, however, become very decided, he in his eighteenth year entered the Trustees' Academy at Edinburgh. Here he so distinguished himself that in 1826 he was invited by the Scottish artists, who had resolved to found a Scottish academy, to join it as an associate. Indeed it was chiefly to the zeal and judgment of Harvey and of two others that it owed its early success. Harvey's first picture, A Village School, was exhibited in 1826 at the Edinburgh Institution; and from the time of the opening of the Academy in the following year he continued annually to enrich its exhibitions by a succession of pictures which, although they never obtained much fame beyond the limits of Scotland, appealed with such effect to Scottish sentiment as to win for him in his native land an unrivalled popularity. His best known pictures are those depicting historical episodes in religious history from a puritan or evangelical point of view, such as Covenanters Preaching, Covenanters' Communion, John Bunyan and his Blind Daughter, Sabbath Evening, and the Quitting of the Manse. He was, however, equally successful in subjects not directly religious; and The Bowlers, A Highland Funeral, The Curlers, A Schule Skailin', and Children Blowing Bubbles in the Churchyard of Greyfriars, Edinburgh, manifest the same close observation of character, artistic conception, and conscientious elaboration of details. In The Night Mail and Dawn Revealing the New World to Columbus the aspects of nature are made use of in different ways, but with equal happiness, to lend impressiveness and solemnity to human concerns. It was chiefly in his later years that he devoted his attention to landscape, the branch of art in which on the whole he was most successful, and there perhaps in suggesting the decp calm and the sweet and varied charm which broods among the hills when nature is at rest. He also devoted some attention to portraiture, among his works in this branch of art being a portrait of Professor Wilson, now at the Philosophical Institution, Edinburgh. In 1829 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Scottish Academy, and in 1864 he succeeded Sir J. W. Gordon as president. He received the honour of knighthood in 1867. His death took place at Edinburgh, January 22, 1876.
Sir George Harvey was the author of a paper on the ' Colour of the Atmosphere," read before the Edinburgh Royal Society, and afterwards published with illustrations in Good IVords; and in 1870 he published a small volume entitled Notes of the Early History of the Royal Scottish Academy. Seleetions from the Works of Sir George Harvey, P.R.S.A., described by the Rev. A. L. Simpson, F.S.A. Scot., and photographed by Thomas Annan, appeared at Edinburgh in 1869.
