164 PROC. ENT. SOC. WASH., VOL. 24, NO. 7-8, OCT.-NOV., 1922 



period of his most active work was between 1570 and 1597, that 

 is to say, five or six years previous to the first great outbreak of 

 the Black Plague, which occurred in 1603, resulting in the loss 

 of 38,000 lives. In that age the science of sanitary engineering 

 was as yet unconceived in Britain, and consequently the con- 

 ditions surrounding even the well-to-do were, of necessity, more 

 squalid and filthy than is easily conceivable in these days of 

 comparatively good sanitation. History pictures the streets 

 as filthy, narrow and unlighted by the sun, because of the fact 

 that most of the buildings overhung them. The soil, resultant 

 upon the density of human habitation, stagnated in the gutters, 

 or "kennels" as they were called, while the biological relations 

 existing between the house fly and the domestic animals, with 

 their train of sequelae pathogenic to man, were undreamed of 

 until hundreds of years later. It seems an unavoidable con- 

 comitant of such conditions, therefore, that the coprophagous 

 and sarcophagous flies of the Muscoidean group bred uninter- 

 ruptedly and by millions, at the very doors of even the aristoc- 

 racy of the time. In view of this it is not remarkable that poor 

 Spenser, endowed with the poet's nervous irritability of tempera- 

 ment, should have reflected annoyance in his verse, nor does it 

 seem any mystery, either, why the well-to-do enclosed their beds 

 with heavy hangings, in spite of the partial asphyxiation which 

 inevitably resulted. 



x^ccording to Macaulay, even as late as 1685, "St. James's 

 square was the receptacle for all the offal and cinders, for all 

 the dead cats and dead dogs of Westminster," 1 while Swift 

 (1710) in "A Description ot a City Shower," draws a similar 

 and even less attractive picture: 



"Now from all parts the swelling kennels flow, 

 And bear their trophies with them as they go; 

 Filths ot all hues and odors seem to tell 

 What street they sailed from by their sight and smell." 



"Sweepings from butcher's stalls, 

 Guts, dung and blood. 



Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud, 

 Dead cats and turnip-tops come tumbling down the flood. " 



All this is reflected directly in the insect fauna of the writings 

 of contemporary poets. Thus, we find in Spenser, Shakespeare, 

 Herrick, Butler, and other poets of the period, abundant al- 

 lusions to worms, maggots, the blow-fly, the fly-blow and the 

 flesh-fly, couched in such familiar terms as to make it quite 

 obvious that myiasis and its attendant phenomena were of com- 

 mon occurrence. 



'See Macaulay, History of England, Chapter 3, London in 1685. 



