28 



The Book of Bugs. 



have a rough rasp with which it scrapes off the albumi- 

 nous surface of book-bindings. 



The house-fly I have spoken of as if he were one. But, 

 like the little girl also in McGuffey's Reader, he is seven. 

 The commonest summer boarder in our houses is Musca 

 douicstica, present all over the globe, wherever man is. 

 Formerly is was one of the simplest sums in arithmetic 

 to figure out the age of the world. Take the current year 

 of the Christian era, for instance, 1902. Add to it 4004. 



Ans. 5906, age of 

 the world. O. E. D. 

 Nowadays it is a 

 more complex cal- 

 culation. It is not 

 a question of years, 

 or t h o u s a n d s of 

 years, but of 

 periods, spelled with 

 capital P's, that 

 may be stretched to 

 the length of a n y 

 number of millions 

 of years, thus vying 

 in elasticity with 

 14 the original Hebrew. 1 ' Granting the immense age 

 of the earth itself, the next question is: How long has 

 man been on it? It took all but blows to convince 

 some people that man was extant in the later Quarter- 

 nary along with the cave-bear and the woolly elephant, 

 and, having yielded so much, they will not budge 

 another inch, no matter how the reckless fellows of 

 the opposing team tug at the rope and insist that there 

 is good evidence that man existed in the later Tertiary. 

 Myself, I think it would be well to have a little fun 



Fig. 4. Musca domestica, the common house- 

 fly : a, adult male, , proboscis and palpus 

 of same; c, terminal joints of antenna; d. head 

 of female ; e, puparium ; /, anterior spiracle. 



