nf Exclusion of the House-Jiu. 3 



full of them ; they swarm on every eatable, and if they are not in- 

 cessantly driven away by a jjerson who has nothing else to do, to 

 eat a meal is impossible*." And it is evident from various incidental 

 notices in the journals of travellers, that they are to the full as great 

 a plague in the hot climates of other portions of the globe. To omit 

 other instances which it would be tedious to cite, Mr. Stewart, in 

 his recent valuable work on North America, speaks on three several 

 occasions of the annoyance which he suffered from flies, which he 

 seems to have found a worse torment than the mosquitoes f. 



Such being the serious and extensive drawback on the comfort of 

 existence caused by the house-fly in the hot months over a large por- 

 tion of the globe, it will be believed that my curiosity was strongly 

 excited on being told, when at Florence last spring, by a gentleman 

 who has long resided in the neighbourhood of that city, that for two 

 or three years past he had so entirely succeeded in excluding these 

 intruders from his apartments, though allowing the windows to be 

 wide open for the admission of air, that while the sitting- and dining- 

 rooms of his neighbours swarmed with them, in his a strict search 

 would be necessary to detect even two or three ; his plan thus su])er- 

 seding all the former modes of removing this plague by poisoning 

 the flies by sweetened infusions of green tea, quassia, &c., which 

 were liable to this great and fatal objection, that unless the windows 

 were closed, or covered with gauze (which necessarily excludes the 

 free entrance of the air), fresh hosts of tormentors were constantly 

 entering to replace those destroyed. 



If my curiosity was excited by this statement, my surprise was 

 not lessened by being told, in explanation of the apparent impossi- 

 bility of thus excluding flies from a room with unclosed windows, 

 that, in point of fact, the ojienings of the windows were covered with 

 a net, but with a net made of white or light coloured thread, and 

 with meshes an inch or more in diameter ; so that there was actually 

 no physical obstacle whatever to the entrance of the flies, every 

 separate mesh being not merely large enough to admit one fly, but 

 several, even with expanded wings, to pass through at the same mo- 

 ment, and that, consequently, both as to the free admission of air, 

 and of the flies if they had chosen, there was practically no greater 

 impediment than if the windows were entirely open, the flies being 

 excluded simply from some inexplicable dread of venturing across 

 this thread- work. 



My friend did not profess to have discovered this plan of excluding 

 flies : he first saw it adopted in the monastery of Camaldoli (or La 



* Travels in France, vol. i. p. 298. f Vol. i. pp. 29, 19.'), 405. 



B 2 



