260 OUR HOUSEHOLD INSECTS 



and dogs are accustomed to lie should be frequently 

 swept, and that the sweepings should be burnt. 



From the eggs are hatched, not brown leaping fleas, 

 but whitish, footless, worm-like maggots, whose bodies 



v 



FIG. 8i.i-Larva of Cat's Flea (Pulexfelis). After Kti nc 



are set with long hairs (Fig. 81). Each larva consists 

 of a head and twelve segments, the last terminated by a 

 pair of hooks. The head carries four tubercles, a pair 

 of short antennae., and a good pair of biting jaws (Fig. 



82), for at this period of 

 its life the young flea 

 devours solid food ; it is 

 neither parasitic nor a 

 blood-sucker. These little 

 grubs are extremely lively 



FIG. 82. Biting Jaw of Flea's Maggot. e J J 



creatures, wriggling about 



vigorously, and working themselves along by aid of their 

 hairs and caudal hooks. They appear to feed upon dry 

 animal substances of various kinds, some fragments of 

 which they are pretty sure to find in the neighbourhood 

 of their birthplace. At the end of the seventeenth 

 century Leeuwenhoek, to whom we owe some of the 

 earliest recorded observations on fleas, kept a colony of 

 larvae, and fed them on the bodies of dead flies. About 

 fifty years later, Rosel tried some larvae with various 

 substances, and found that they refused sawdust, both 

 from old and fresh wood ; and that so far from enjoying 



