OF SELBOENE. 533 



the beast into it's flesh, and grow to a large size. 1 I have 

 just talked with a man, who says, he has been employed, 

 more than once, in stripping calves that had dyed of the 

 puckeridge : that the ail, or complaint, lay along the chine, 

 where the flesh was much swelled, and filled with purulent 

 matter. Once myself I saw a large, rough maggot of this 

 sort squeezed out of the back of a cow. An intelligent 

 friend informs me, that the disease along the chines of 

 calves, or rather the maggots that cause them, are called by 

 the graziers in Cheshire worry brees, and a single one worry 

 bree. No doubt they mean a breeze, or breeze, the name for 

 the gad-fly, or oestrus, the parent of these maggots, which 

 lays its eggs along the backs of kine. 



But to return to the fern-owl. The least attention and 

 observation would convince men that these poor birds 

 neither injure the goat-herd, nor the grazier; but that 

 they are perfectly harmless, and subsist alone on night- 

 moths, and beetles ; and through the month of July mostly 

 on the scarabceus solstitialis, the small tree-beetle, which in 

 many districts flies and abounds at that season. Those that 

 we have opened have always had their craws stuffed with 

 large night moths, and pieces of chafers ; nor does it any- 

 wise appear, how they can, weak and unarmed a a they are, 

 inflict any malady on kine, unless they possess the powers 

 of animal magnetism, and can affect them by fluttering over 

 them. Upon recollection it must have been at your house 

 that the amiable Mr. Stillingfleet kept his " Calendar of 

 Flora " in 1755. 2 Similar pursuits make intimate and 



1 In letter XXXI Y. to Pennant (p. 107 and note), as well as in the 

 " Observations on Insects and Vermes," (p. 349,) this insect is noticed 

 by White under the name (Estrus curvicauda. At the date of his 

 former letter, March 30th, 1771, he seems to have been unaware that it 

 had been described by Linnaeus as (Estrus bovis, but this impression was 

 evidently altered before the date of the present letter to Marsham. ED. 



2 This was so. Stillingfleet refers to him as his " very worthy and 

 ingenious friend Robert Marsham," and speaks in high terms of the hos- 

 pitable treatment that he experienced at Stratton. See the fifth letter 

 of the present series, p. 545. The " Calendar of Flora," made in 1755 



