LIFE HISTORY 
13 
the Club House has been notably small, considering the 
fact that the Club maintains a dining-room and its win¬ 
dows and doors are not screened. A year ago last fall 
there was a sudden incursion of flies, so that they created 
much annoyance in all parts of the Club House; and they 
were specially abundant in my room. I protected my 
windows by screens, and then captured the flies on sticky 
fly paper, securing in that way more than 2,000. The 
nuisance in other rooms continued several weeks longer, 
and then gradually abated. There was no recurrence at 
the corresponding season last fall. 
“Recalling some statements of yours with reference to 
the life history of the house fly, I noted that the epidemic 
was coincident with the grading of the University ath¬ 
letic field, about 200 yards from the Faculty Club, and 
that in that grading many horses were employed, probably 
as many as fifty. So far as I am aware there are no 
horses stabled on the University campus, and I do not 
recall having seen any horse stables at a less distance than 
two blocks, or, say, three times the distance of the athletic 
field. These various relations of time and space serve to 
connect the local fly epidemic in a fairly definite way with 
the temporary proximity of a large number of horses. 
“Yours very truly, 
“G. K. Gilbert.” 
In an article entitled “Experiments on Transmission 
of Bacteria by Flies with Especial Relation to an Epi¬ 
demic of Bacillary Dysentery at the Worcester State 
Hospital,” Dr. Samuel T. Orton (1910), after describ¬ 
ing a series of very interesting experiments indicating 
the spread of a species of bacillus throughout the in¬ 
stitution by the agency of flies, describes a search made 
to discover the breeding places of the unusual number 
of flies infesting the hospital. Searching first for horse 
