thrive all the year round,” or is kept till the first mare foals and is then given to her as her first food. Throughout the world, as J. G. Frazer shows, the semi-worship of the last sheaf is or has been the great feature of the harvest-home. Among harvest customs none is more interesting than harvest cries. The cry of the Egyptian reapers announcing the death of the corn-spirit, the rustic prototype of Osiris, has found its echo on the world’s harvest-fields, and to this day, to take an English example, the Devonshire reapers utter cries of the same sort and go through a ceremony which in its main features is an exact counterpart of pagan worship. “After the wheat is cut they ‘cry the neck.’ . . . An old man goes round to the shocks and picks out a bundle of the best ears he can find. . . this bundle is called ‘the neck’; the harvest hands then stand round in a ring, the old man holding ‘the neck’ in the centre. At a signal from him they take off their hats, stooping and holding them with both hands towards the ground. Then all together they utter in a prolonged cry ‘the neck!’ three times, raising themselves upright with their hats held above their heads. Then they change their cry to ‘Wee yen! way yen!’ or, as some report, ‘we haven!’ ” On a fine still autumn evening “crying the neck” has a wonderful effect at a distance. In East Anglia there still survives the custom known as “Hallering Largess.” The harvesters beg largess from passers, and when they have received money they shout thrice “Halloo, largess,” having first formed a circle, bowed their heads low crying “Hoo-Hoo-Hoo,” and then jerked their heads backwards and uttered a shrill shriek of “Ah! Ah!”
For a very full discussion of harvest customs see J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, and Brand’s Antiquities of Great Britain (Hazlitt’s edit., 1905).
HARVEST-BUG, the familiar name for mites of the family
Trombidiidae, belonging to the order Acari of the class Arachnida.
Although at one time regarded as constituting a distinct species,
described as Leptus autumnalis, harvest-bugs are now known to
be the six-legged larval forms of several British species of mites
of the genus Trombidium. They are minute, rusty-brown
organisms, barely visible to the naked eye, which swarm in grass
and low herbage in the summer and early autumn, and cause
considerable, sometimes intense, irritation by piercing and
adhering to the skin of the leg, usually lodging themselves in
some part where the clothing is tight, such as the knee when
covered with gartered stockings. They may be readily destroyed,
and the irritation allayed, by rubbing the affected area with some
insecticide like turpentine or benzine. They are not permanently
parasitic, and if left alone will leave their temporary host to
resume the active life characteristic of the adult mite, which is
predatory in habits, preying upon minute living animal
organisms.
HARVESTER, Harvest-Spider, or Harvest-Man, names
given to Arachnids of the order Opiliones, referable to various
species of the family Phalangiidae. Harvest-spiders or harvest-men,
so-called on account of their abundance in the late summer
and early autumn, may be at once distinguished from all true
spiders by the extreme length and thinness of their legs, and by
the small size and spherical or oval shape of the body, which is not
divided by a waist or constriction into an anterior and a posterior
region. They may be met with in houses, back yards, fields,
woods and heaths; either climbing on walls, running over the
grass, or lurking under stones and fallen tree trunks. They are
predaceous, feeding upon small insects, mites and spiders. The
males are smaller than the females, and often differ from them in
certain well-marked secondary sexual characters, such as the
mandibular protuberance from which one of the common English
spiders, Phalangium cornutum, takes its scientific name. The
male is also furnished with a long and protrusible penis, and the
female with an equally long and protrusible ovipositor. The
sexes pair in the autumn, and the female, by means of her
ovipositor, lays her eggs in some cleft or hole in the soil and
leaves them to their fate. After breeding, the parents die with
the autumn cold; but the eggs retain their vitality through the
winter and hatch with the warmth of spring and early summer,
the young gradually attaining maturity as the latter season
progresses. Hence the prevalence of adult individuals in the late
summer and autumn, and at no other time of the year. They
are provided with a pair of glands, situated one on each side of
the carapace, which secrete an evil-smelling fluid believed to be
protective in nature. Harvest-men are very widely distributed
and are especially abundant in temperate countries of the
northern hemisphere. They are also, however, common in India,
where they are well known for their habit of adhering together
in great masses, comparable to a swarm of bees, and of swaying
gently backwards and forwards. The long legs of harvest-men
serve them not only as organs of rapid locomotion, but also as
props to raise the body well off the ground, thus enabling the
animals to stalk unmolested from the midst of an army of raiding
ants.
| Fig. 1.—Harvest-man (Phalangium cornutum, Linn.); profile of male, with legs and palpi truncated. | |||
| a, | Ocular tubercle. | d, | Sheath of penis protruded. |
| b, | Mandible | e, | Penis. |
| c, | Labrum (upper lip). | f, | The glans. |
(R. I. P.)
HARVEY, GABRIEL (c. 1545–1630), English writer, eldest son
of a ropemaker of Saffron-Walden, Essex, was born about 1545.
He matriculated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1566, and in
1570 was elected fellow of Pembroke Hall. Here he formed a
lasting friendship with Edmund Spenser, and it has been suggested
(Athen. Cantab., ii. 258) that he may have been the poet’s
tutor. Harvey was a scholar of considerable weight, who has
perhaps been judged too exclusively from the brilliant invectives
directed against him by Thomas Nashe. Henry Morley, writing
in the Fortnightly Review (March 1869), brought evidence from
Harvey’s Latin writings which shows that he was distinguished
by quite other qualities than the pedantry and conceit usually
associated with his name. He desired to be “epitaphed as the
Inventour of the English Hexameter,” and was the prime mover
in the literary clique that desired to impose on English verse the
Latin rules of quantity. In a “gallant, familiar letter” to M.
Immerito (Edmund Spenser) he says that Sir Edward Dyer and
Sir Philip Sidney were helping forward “our new famous enterprise
for the exchanging of Barbarous and Balductum Rymes
with Artificial Verses.” The document includes a tepid appreciation
of the Faerie Queene which had been sent to him for his
opinion, and he gives examples of English hexameters illustrative
of the principles enunciated in the correspondence. The opening
lines—
“What might I call this Tree? A Laurell? O bonny Laurell
Needes to thy bowes will I bow this knee, and vayle my bonetto”—
afford a fair sample of the success of Harvey’s metrical experiments, which presented a fair mark for the wit of Thomas Nashe. “He (Harvey) goes twitching and hopping in our language like a man running upon quagmires, up the hill in one syllable, and down the dale in another,” says Nashe in Strange Newes, and he mimics him in the mocking couplet:
“But eh! what news do you hear of that good Gabriel Huffe-Snuffe,
Known to the world for a foole, and clapt in the Fleete for a Runner?”
Harvey exercised great influence over Spenser for a short time and the friendship lasted even though Spenser’s genius refused
