38 MORE MINOR HORRORS 



marked by little pimples, like those of the Athenry 

 animals, easily to be seen with the naked eye. These 

 increased slightly in size, but soon healed up, land 

 in less than a week not a trace of the maggots' 

 entrances could be found i The boring-in of the 

 maggots seemed at first to cause the calf a little 

 pain, but the symptoms of discomfort soon passed 

 away. 



We have still to find out what happens to the 

 first-stage larva after it has bored into the skin 

 and how far it travels before it undergoes its 

 first moult. Glaser found that some eggs of H. 

 lineatum laid on his trousers hatched, and that a 

 maggot bored right through into his own skin. 

 From symptoms of swelling and pain in various 

 regions he concluded that this maggot travelled 

 to his gullet, and he finally extracted it (in the 

 second stage) from his mouth. ^ 



Perhaps in the first stage they may be 

 carried by the blood stream. They seem in their 

 second larval stage to wander freely through 

 the tissues, especially through the muscular 

 tissues, of the body of their host — ^usually 

 working upwards, and not infrequently reach- 

 ing the neighbourhood of the vertebral column 

 before taking up — still in the second larval 

 stage — their final position, where their presence 

 gives rise to the ' warbles,' or subcutaneous 

 cysts or tumours, in which the third and fourth 

 larval stages are passed. 



1 The Irish Naturalist, October 1914. 



