In the middle of the last century there was a boy, thought to be too delicate to be sent to school, who early earned for himself the character of being a strange child. When barely more than nine years old he visited an Aunt who was a veritable exemplar of genteel breeding and propriety after the early Victorian pattern. There he was seriously reprimanded for the "cruelty" of feeding his secret pets, which were garden spiders, with flies which were, so the Aunt said, "poor innocent creatures made by God for a useful purpose," but, she inconsequentially added,—"Spiders were horrid." The strange child replied that the Devil made the flies, and that God made the spiders to eat them. The astonished Aunt then elicited the fact that the strange child's father had explained, during a Sunday Bible lesson, that Beelzebub (the Devil) meant Lord-of-flies.
This strange child was taken a walk over Doncaster Heath by the Aunt's maid. There a dead rabbit was seen from which maggots were crawling, and the maid explained that it was fly-blown. Next they both stroked and patted a patient donkey, and the strange child observed maggots rolling out of the donkey's nostril[[1]] on to the ground; he wondered much that live animals should be fly-blown. He also saw with pity some cows, around whose eyes flies clustered.
Pondering on these matters, one day he confided to the Aunt his confirmed opinion in these words—"It seems, Aunt, to me that people who won't kill flies deserve to be fly-blown." Doubtless, it would have been better if he had expressed himself thus—People who will not kill fleas deserve to be flea-bitten; and people who will not wage war against flies deserve to be fly-tormented. However, the horrified Aunt mistook the observation for insult and impudent rebellion, and what ensued need not be related as pointing no useful moral. The strange child was merely a genuine early nature student ahead of the times by some fifty or sixty years. In due course he learnt a more orthodox account of "Creation," and the existence of mysteries in facts physiological and spiritual, which can only be imperfectly comprehended in this world.
His craving for nature study was not satisfied with the reading of most of the cheap books then published for the diffusion of knowledge. Collecting butterflies and moths sufficed for some of his schoolfellows in later years, but, not then having access to really good handbooks, he became an original investigator in wide fields of nature study, and thus learnt that many statements and opinions, which ordinarily even at the present day pass current as facts, are erroneous and misleading. Accordingly, the reader need not be surprised at some statements in the following pages at variance with what may be met with elsewhere.
[1]. Stevens' Book of the Farm and many other publications describe the similar affliction of sheep by Œstrus ovis but omit to notice the case of the donkey, which I have witnessed several times, but have never seen a horse or pony thus afflicted. There is a fly termed Œstrus nasalis, of which the victimised host is uncertain, for Linnæus was mistaken in stating that the larvæ are found in the fauces of "horses, asses, mules, stags, and goats," entering by the nostril.
The old fanciful dogma that everything existing was actually created "in the beginning," and "for a purpose," was once ardently championed as controverting aggressive Voltairean atheism, but it must be now recognised as an unwarranted assumption, deduced from an orthodox doctrine of "design," which in itself seems acceptably agreeable with the idea of unity, consistency, and perfection in Creation and The Creator. In fact the said "fanciful" dogma never really was an integral part of Christian Catholic doctrine. The house-fly, as we know it, is absolutely the developed product of human insanitation; scientifically and practically it is a new "species" of an old "genus" established by a long course of breeding in man-made environments.
Fig. 1. The House-Fly, Female, Enlarged.
