NOTES TO THE 
saved ii long carpenter's bill for pulling up the boards and 
putting theui down again. 
Elephants and Flies. — Eegarding tlie balance of nature, 
showing how minute beings might be the destruction of gigantic 
things, my friend Mr. Bartlett remarks that in the native 
state Hies are great enemies to elephants. If an elephant gets 
Avounded, flies deposit their eggs in the wounds ; these eggs turn 
into maggoLs, and ultimately cause the death of the animal. 
Flies and Choleea. — H.B. writes : — " The Italians are not the 
only people in the world who say flies disappear before cholera. 
The Welsh had, and may still have, a like idea. I remember 
liearing my mother say that, when this scourge first visited 
South Wales, it stopped at an old farm called Kidwelly in Car- 
marthenshire, half-way between Llanelly and Carmarthen ; that 
it raged badly in the former town, but Carmarthen was free ; 
and that they used to watch the flies anxiously every morning, 
it having been noticed that in all places where the cholera was, 
the flies disappeared. I also remember hearing that it was 
recorded in some old deeds, the great plague had halted at or 
near Kidwelly, but Carmarthen has since within my recollection 
been visited by cholera ; so I conclude the charm, with which 
old ' Merlin' was somehow associated, has been broken." 
House-fly Maggots. — The maggots of the common house-fly 
{Mnsca domestica) occur abundantly in horse-manure. The late 
Dr. E. Stanley, Bishop of Norwich, remarks that " the number 
of house-flies might be greatly lessened in large tow^ns, if the 
stable- dung, in which their larvpe are chiefly supposed to feed, 
were kept in pits closed by trap-doors, so that the flies could not 
deposit their eggs in it. At Venice, where no horses are kept, 
it is said there are no house-flies." 
Mr. Davy breeds great numbers of maggots every year. 
He begins to breed them before the arrival of the soft-billed 
birds, so as to have maggots ready to feed them when first caught. 
By these means he has t3een able to rear some of the rarest of 
the soft-meat birds. He finds that in the early spring the 
flies will deposit their eggs in dead " birds," in preference to any 
kind of offaL They commence, as a rule, to " blow " at the nose 
and eyes first, and on a hot day the eggs will hatch out in four- 
teen or fifteen hours. The maggot, when ten days old, is ready 
for the birds. Maggots are used to tempt soft-meat birds to take 
their artificial food. When the eyes of a dead bird are once 
filled with fiy-blovvs, another bluebottle coming also to deposit her 
eggs seems to know that the place has been already taken up ; she 
