The Plague of Flies. 23 



About the time when McGuffey's School Readers were 

 being compiled, books that I have no false modesty in 

 saying formed and directed some of the greatest minds 

 of the age, Natural Philosophy set for herself two definite 

 tasks : ( I ) To demonstrate the wonders of common 

 things, and (2) to prove that everything was created for 

 some wise purpose. The danger that lurked in Xo. i was 

 that the desire to exhibit the marvelous overcame 

 the impulse to tell the simple truth, and Xo. 2 naively 

 assumed that ' wise purpose ' meant the aid and com- 

 fort of the human race only, a very small percentage 

 of the population of the world, when you come to think 

 of it. 



Wherein the fly was shown to have been created for 

 some wise purpose has slipped my memory for the mo- 

 ment. I think it was said to be a scavenger that saved 

 us all from dying in a hurry from dread diseases. In 

 those days men were too busy in showing the \vonders 

 of nature to fool away time on the question of whether 

 flies carried infection on their feet. In these days we 

 have come to realize that a fly that has got itself mistaken 

 for a currant, while dreadful to contemplate, is not so 

 dangerous as a fly just come from visiting a typhoid- 

 fever case, fished out of a glass of milk by a dear chi'.cl 

 taught to be kind to all living things. The fly in the 

 cake may not be appetizing, but it is innocuous and 

 thoroughly sterilized. As I say, the usefulness of the 

 fly is a little dim in my recollection, but the wonders of 

 its foot as celebrated in McGuffey's Fourth Reader I 

 shall never forget. I think it was Uncle Harry, though 

 it may have been Uncle James or Uncle George, had a 

 microscope, and showed to the good little boy and the 

 good little girl the air pump with which Mr. Fly exhausted 

 the air from under his foot and stuck to the ceiling or 



