294 THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 



Howard, and bearing the labels, "248. 1247. 12479- Aphel. 248 do. 

 C. H. T. Mch. 15, 10. T. Johuaimaji. Feb. 11." 



Habitat. — Peru, South America. 



Ty])e. — Type No. 14,026, United States National Museum, Wash- 

 ington, D. C, I female in xylol-balsam (mounted with a single female of 

 Signiphora). 



BOOK NOTICES. 



The House Fly. 



"The House Fly," by L. O. Howard. XIX + 312 pp., i pi., 40 fig--. 

 Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York, 191 1. 



One of the most extraordinary examples of the fickleness of hum in 

 nature is furnished by our attitude towards the commonest of all insects. 

 Even the youngest of us was brought up in companionship with this homely 

 creature, and taught to regard with painful horror the iniquity of destroy- 

 ing, however painlessly, this permanent guest. Well might we say when 

 introducing this volume to the public, Tempora mutantur, ?ios et mutamiir 

 in mis. From the high pedestal of kindly regard Miisca domestica has 

 sunk to depths so loathsome and portentous as to make even an ento- 

 mologist recoil from these "winged sponges spreading hither and thither 

 to carry out the foul behests of contagion," to quote the words of Lord 

 Avebury, written so long ago as 187 1. 



The credit of first seriously attracting public attention to the possible 

 dissemination of disease germs by the house-fly belongs to investigators in 

 the United States. The experience of the Spanish-American war, with its 

 excessively heavy mortality from typhoid fever, was repeated in the South 

 African war a few years later. Circumstantial evidence has been confirmed 

 by exact experiments, which, though in many instances they may modify 

 primary conjectures, have shown that the house-fly, if the necessary con- 

 ditions prevail, will serve as a most serious carrier of pathogenic organisms. 

 On this account, therefore, it ranks as one of the proven disease-carrying 

 insects, and must be included with the mosquito, the tse-tse fly and the 

 flea in that class of insects which bear a serious relation to national welfare. 

 No one has done more to inculcate these ideas into the minds of people, 

 obsessed with the customary apathy, than Dr. Howard, who was one of 

 the first to consider the house-fly and to study it in its new relation, 

 deserving well the title of "Commander-in-Chief of the Fly-fighting Army," 

 recently conferred upon him by a well-known journal. From Dr. Howard 



