I 9 I 3" I 9 I 4-] The Common House Fly. 113 



John Euskin also evinced an intense admiration for the 

 fly, and, in his ' Queen of the Air ' we find him writing, " I 

 believe that we can nowhere find a better type of a perfectly 

 free creature than in the common house fly. Not only free, 

 but brave ; and irreverent to a degree which I think no 

 human republican could by any philosophy exalt himself to. 

 There is no courtesy in him ; he does not care whether it is 

 king or clown whom he teases ; and in every step or pause 

 there is one and the same expression of perfect egoism, perfect 

 independence and self-confidence, and conviction of the world's 

 having been made for flies. Strike at him with your hand 

 . . . and he alights on the back of it. You cannot terrify 

 him, nor govern him, nor persuade him, nor convince him. 

 He has his own positive opinion on all matters ; not an un- 

 wise one, usually, for his own ends. He has no work to do — 

 no tyrannical instinct to obey. . . . But your fly, free in the 

 air, free in the chamber, — a black incarnation of caprice — 

 wandering, investigating, flitting, flirting, feasting at his will, 

 with rich variety of choice in feast, from the heaped sweets 

 in the grocer's window to those of the butcher's back-yard, 

 and from the galled place on your cab-horse's back to the 

 brown spot in the road, from which, as the hoof disturbs him, 

 he rises with angry republican buzz — what freedom is like 

 his ? " 



It is well named the common fly — for there is hardly a 

 spot on the inhabited globe where it is not found. It has 

 been carried to every region to which man has travelled, and, 

 no matter how uncongenial the climate may have been to its 

 early progenitors, succeeding generations have adapted them- 

 selves to either tropical or sub- arctic conditions, so that it has 

 thriven. Of course certain climatic conditions favour its 

 multiplication, and so in warm and often insanitary countries 

 we find the common fly existing as a plague. Even in our 

 own country, during a hot summer, the cheaper boarding- 

 houses and eating places become the peculiar habitat of these 

 insects, to the great annoyance of the visitors. The more 

 overcrowded and therefore insanitary the poorer parts of our 

 large cities are, the greater is the number of flies, and we shall 

 see later the direct influence which they have in lowering the 

 health of the community. 



