396 INFLUENCES OF CULTIVATION 



"The people of Orkney," he wrote, "gather the sea-ware (which is frequently 

 and especially cast out by the sea) into heaps, which, being putrified, 

 affordeth a very bad smell, and many insects which the sterlings do feed 

 upon, and therefore it is ordinary to see hundreds of these birds upon 

 each heap." 



Consider again that peculiar fauna, consisting mainly of 

 Beetles Shakespeare's "shard-borne beetle, with his drowsy 

 hum," and its relatives which spends its life feeding and 

 breeding in the dung of domestic animals. How that minute 

 fauna, containing amongst others, Beetles of the genera 

 Sphceridium, Cercyon, Megasternutn, and Cryptopleurum 

 in the family Hydrophilidae, and Aphodius amongst the 

 Scarabeids, must have multiplied since man introduced 

 domestic animals to Scotland, and by closer and closer culti- 

 vation increased his stock till it outnumbered many times the 

 wild stock which it displaced! In the same category, as 

 dependent for its present day numbers upon the excrement 

 of domestic stock, may be mentioned a Two-winged Fly 

 or Dipteron the common Yellow Dung Fly, Scatophaga 

 stercorarid 1 , whose name sufficiently indicates its unseemly 

 habits. Of even wider distribution, and owing its multitudes 

 still more evidently to the presence of man, is the Common 

 House-Fly (Musca domestica]. In every rotting heap of garb- 

 age it finds a comfortable nursery where it lays eggs which 

 bring forth young in countless myriads, so that even the 

 stolid Briton has turned at last and has sworn death to the 

 Fly, the carrier of typhoid and similar diseases. 



If such are the developments of animal life due to normal 

 conditions of advanced civilization, what can be said of the 

 effects of the highly abnormal conditions of modern warfare ? 

 For how much has the garbage of the battlefield to answer ? 

 Beasts and birds of prey, Wolves, Vultures, Buzzards and 

 Carrion Crows follow in the wake of the armies of Eastern 

 Europe to-day as persistently as they have done in every war 

 to which history bears record ; but under modern conditions 

 still new hosts have arisen. Rats, and disease-bearing insects, 

 Fleas, Lice, the Blow- Fly, the House-Fly and many relatives, 

 have appeared in such overwhelming numbers and have 

 caused so much suffering to man and beast as to call for the 

 efforts of special medical organizations. 



1 Gr. o-Ktop, o-Karos, dung, and fa-yew, to eat ; and Lat. stercorarius, 

 pertaining to dung. 



