106 



NOTES TO THE 



saved ;i long carpenter's bill for pulling up the boards and 

 putting them down again. 



ELEPHANTS AND FLIES. Regarding the balance of nature, 

 showing how minute beings might be the destruction of gigantic 

 things, my friend Mr. Bartlett remarks that in the native 

 state Hies are great enemies to elephants. If an elephant gets 

 wounded, flies deposit their eggs in the wounds ; these eggs turn 

 into maggots, and ultimately cause the death of the animal. 



FLIES AND CHOLERA. H.B. writes : " The Italians are not the 

 only people in the world who say flies disappear before cholera. 

 The Welsh had, and may still have, a like idea. I remember 

 hearing my mother say that, when this scourge first visited 

 South Wales, it stopped at an old farm called Kidwelly in Car- 

 marthenshire, half-way between Llanelly and Carmarthen ; that 

 it raged badly in the former town, but Carmarthen was free ; 

 and that they used to watch the flies anxiously every morning, 

 it having been noticed that in all places where the cholera was, 

 the flies disappeared. I also remember hearing that it was 

 recorded in some old deeds, the great plague had halted at or 

 near Kidwelly, but Carmarthen has since within my recollection 

 been visited by cholera ; so I conclude the charm, with which 

 old ' Merlin ' was somehow associated, has been broken." 



HOUSE-FLY MAGGOTS. The maggots of the common house-fly 

 (Musca domestica) occur abundantly in horse-manure. The late 

 Dr. E. Stanley, Bishop of Norwich, remarks that " the number 

 of house-flies might be greatly lessened in large towns, if the 

 stable-dung, in which their larvae are chiefly supposed to feed, 

 were kept in pits closed by trap-doors, so that the flies could not 

 deposit their eggs in it. At Venice, where no horses are kept, 

 it is said there are no house-flies." 



Mr. Davy breeds great numbers of maggots every year. 

 He begins to breed them before the arrival of the soft-billed 

 birds, so as to have maggots ready to feed them when first caught. 

 By these means he has been able to rear some of the rarest of 

 the soft-meat birds. He finds that in the early spring the 

 flies will deposit their eggs in dead " birds," in preference to any 

 kind of offal. They commence, as a rule, to " blow " at the nose 

 and eyes first, and on a hot day the eggs will hatch out in four- 

 teen or fifteen hours. The maggot, "when ten days old, is ready 

 for the birds. Maggots are used to tempt soft-meat birds to take 

 their artificial food. When the eyes of a dead bird are once 

 filled with fly-blows, another bluebottle coming also to deposit her 

 eggs seems to know that the place has been already taken up ; she 



