Saprini, Dermestes and Others 



maggot, their favourite meat. While 

 waiting for the vermin to grow, they take 

 a few sips of the sanies; but these are 

 scarcely more than an appetizer in prepara- 

 tion for the great feast, when the wriggling 

 grubs are fattened to a turn. 



Seeing them so active, one at first pictures 

 them as occupied with family-cares. So I 

 believed; and I was wrong. Under the car- 

 rion in my necrotic laboratory, there is never 

 an egg belonging to them, never a larva. 

 The family must be established elsewhere, 

 in the dung-hills and dust-heaps apparently. 

 I have, in fact, found their nymphs, which 

 are easily recognized, in March, on the floor 

 of a poultry-run saturated with the drop- 

 pings of the fowls. The adults visit my ret- 

 ting-pans to feast upon the maggot. When 

 their mission is accomplished, in the late 

 autumn, they seem to return to the filth un- 

 der whose shelter the generation is prepared 

 which, as soon as winter is over, hastens to 

 the dead bodies of animals to moderate the 

 excesses of the Sarcophagae ^ and the 

 Lucilias. 



The labours of the Fly do not satisfy the 

 requirements of hygiene. When the soil 



1 S. carnaria is the Grey Flesh-fly. — Translator's Note. 

 41 



