The Life of the Fly 



familiar to her, though she does not use it for 

 her own feeding; motherhood, that great in- 

 spirer of instinct, teaches her all about it. 



Scrupulous though she be in choosing ex- 

 actly where to lay her eggs, the Bluebottle 

 does not trouble about the quality of the pro- 

 visions intended for her family's consumption. 

 Any dead body suits her purpose. Redi,^ the 

 Italian scientist who first exploded the old, 

 foolish notion of worms begotten of corrup- 

 tion, fed the vermin in his laboratory with 

 meat of very different kinds. In order to 

 make his tests the more conclusive, he exag- 

 gerated the largess of the dining-hall. The 

 diet was varied with tiger- and lion-flesh, bear 

 and leopard, fox and wolf, mutton and beef, 

 horse-flesh, donkey-flesh and many others, sup- 

 plied by the rich menagerie of Florence. This 

 wastefulness was unnecessary: wolf and mut- 

 ton are all the same to an unprejudiced 

 stomach. 



A distant disciple of the maggot's bio- 

 grapher, I look at the problem in a light which 

 Redi never dreamt of. Any flesh of one of the 

 higher animals suits the Fly's family. Will it 



'Francesco Redi (1626-1698), the Italian naturalist and 

 poet, author of Esperienze intorno alia generazione degli 

 insetti. — Translator's Note. 



348 



