water-insect

At a distance, the vessel looked like, or at least I compared it to, a monstrous water-insect, skimming along the river.

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 Various

She had got out her sweeps and looked like some gigantic water-insect as she made her way towards us, churning the sleeping waters into foam.

Here, There and Everywhere Frederick Spencer Hamilton 1892

It was really a surprisingly small dinghy and it ran to and fro like a water-insect fussing noisily down there with immense self-importance.

Notes on Life and Letters Joseph Conrad 1890

At a distance, the vessel looked like, or at least I compared it to, a monstrous water-insect skimming along the river.

Passages from the American Notebooks, Volume 1 Nathaniel Hawthorne 1834

Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion.

Biographia Literaria Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1803

Some very tropical genera ascend thus high; as _Paspalum_ amongst grasses, and _Scleria, _ a kind of sedge.] the temperature of the water was 92 degrees near the edges, where a water-insect

Himalayan Journals — Complete 1864