DIPTERA. 493 



them in, and makes a business of driving out the intruders at 

 least once a day. If a plateful of strong green tea, well sweet- 

 ened, be placed in an outer apartment accessible to flies, they 

 will taste of it, and be killed thereby, as surely as by the most 

 approved fly-poison. In the first volume of " The Transac- 

 tions of the Entomological Society of London," Mr. Spence 

 gives an account of a mode of excluding flies from apartments, 

 which has been tried with complete success in England. It 

 consists of netting, made of fine worsted or thread, in large 

 meshes, or of threads alone, half of an inch or more apart, 

 stretched across the windows. It appears that the flies will 

 not attempt to pass through the meshes, or between the threads, 

 into a room which is lighted only on one side; but if there are 

 windows on another side of the room they will then fly through ; 

 such windows should therefore be darkened with shutters or 

 thick curtains. 



The Anthomyians, or flower-flies ( Anthomyiad^), are easily 

 distinguished from the preceding flies, which they otherwise 

 resemble, by the smaller size of their winglets, and by the mesh 

 in the middle of their wings, which is long, narrow, and open 

 at the end. They are smaller insects than the foregoing, their 

 flight is more feeble, their wings, when at rest, do not spread 

 so much, and the bristle on the last joint of their antennae is 

 not often feathered. Most of them frequent flowers, and are 

 sometimes seen sporting together, in large swarms, in the air, 

 like certain kinds of gnats. In the larva state some of them 

 live in manure, and in rotten vegetable substances; others are 

 fovmd in the roots of living plants, such as onions, radishes, 

 turnips, and even in the pulpy parts of leaves and of stems, 

 which they devour. The latter have nearly the same form as 

 the maggots of conmion flies ; some of the former are shorter, 

 flattened, and fringed on the sides with feathery hairs. 



Many instances are recorded of these fringed maggots having 

 been discharged from the human body. They are supposed to 

 be the young of a fly named Anthomyia {Homalomyia) scalaris* 



* For an account of the transformations of the fly of privies, -with figures, see 

 Swammerdam's "Book of Nature," translated by Hill, Part II., p. 38, plate 38. 



