CONTHOI.r.l'.n ITPATIOX 449 



beautiful process within be interrupted and the design 

 shattered. 



Up to now, the insect lias resembled its ancestral fam- 

 ily, less higlily developed worm-like creatures of another day. 

 Just as we have develo])ed from less perfect creatures, so 

 has the fly. Within the little yellow keg a wonderful change 

 is in process. 



At first the maggot, so recently an active definite crea- 

 ture, is seized upon by a host of nature's strangest forces. 

 We cannot see them or give them any definite form. Never- 

 theless they are there, like a great group of wreckers, carpen- 

 ters, masons, [)ainters and decorators. The larva or maggot, 

 the ancestral form, is torn down and reduced to a disinte- 

 grated mass of fluid. From this utter wreck of what was 

 so lately a crawling, organized creature, the final insect is 

 resurrected. From old tissues, new ones spring, from what 

 was old and out of date, a more modern creature is erected. 

 The yellow keg is no longer a coffin, but a factory where a 

 host of raw materials are to be transformed into the finished 

 product ! 



The process is comparable to tearing down an old fash- 

 ioned house and erecting a modern one on the old founda- 

 tions. JNIuch of the old material is used and that which must 

 be replaced by new is burned or otherwise disposed of. So 

 it is M'ith the tissues of the maggot. From the old house we 

 save the plumbing, the wiring and the kitchen range, which 

 corresponds in the maggot to the reproductive glands, the 

 nervous system and the heart, which are left intact, or at 

 most altered and attended to. 



At length it becomes time for the painters and decor- 

 tors. Nature employs a vast army of these. In the keg, 

 after ten days, the milky white and partly transparent, but 

 otherwise perfect insect commences to receive its color. It 

 appears first in the eyes with an influx of emerald green pig- 

 ment studded with golden, microscopical dots, which are fol- 

 lowed in forty-eight hours by the appearance of black pat- 



