176 tJuue 



ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. 



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Philadelphia, Pa., June, 1899. 



LDiTORIAL. 



' ' Prior to 1618 it was supposed that all small animals were 

 spontaneously generated ; for instance, eels were supposed to 

 be generated from the slime of the Nile, and maggots were 

 thought to be spontaneously generated in meat. To the ex- 

 amination of this very point the celebrated Francesco Redi, 

 physician to the Grand Dukes Ferdinand the Second and 

 Coomos the Third, of Tuscany, and a member of the Academy 

 del Cimento, addressed himself in 1618. He had seen the 

 maggots of putrefying flesh and reflected on their possible ori- 

 gin. But he was not content with mere reflection nor with 

 the theoretic guesswork which his predecessors had founded 

 on imperfect observations. Watching meat during its passage 

 from freshness to decay, prior to the appearance of maggots, 

 he invariably observed flies buzzing around the meat and fre- 

 quently alighting upon it. The maggots, he thought, might 

 be the half- developed progeny of these flies. The inductive 

 guess precedes experiment, by which, however, it must be 

 finally tested. 



