The House Fly—Disease Carrier 
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ZOOLOGICAL POSITION, LIFE HISTORY, AND 
HABITS 
Zoological Position 
OOLOGICALLY speaking, this insect belongs to 
the order Diptera, or two-winged flies. In this 
order it is the type of a superfamily known as the Mus- 
coidea, of a family known as the Muscidse and of the 
genus Musca, the specific name given to it originally 
by Linnaeus being domestica; and among zoologists it 
is referred to as Musca domestica L. 
The superfamily Muscoidea, to which it belongs and 
of which it is the type, is a very large group contain¬ 
ing a number of families and many species which so 
closely resemble the house fly that to the untrained eye 
they cannot be distinguished. Dr. David' Sharp, in 
the Cambridge Natural History, writing of the house 
fly, states that “it sometimes occurs in large numbers 
away from the dwellings of man/’ and the writer is 
often asked to explain why parties camping in the 
Northwest, on the prairies for example, many miles 
away from human habitations, almost immediately 
find their camps infested with the house fly. The an¬ 
swer to such questions, and possibly the answer to the 
