OF 8ELB0BNE. 
633 
the beast into it^s flesh, and grow to a large size/ 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 
hree. No doubt they mean a hreese, or hreeze, 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 scarahceus 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 stufi'ed with 
large night moths, and pieces of chafers ; .nor does it any- 
wise appear, how they can, weak and unarmed 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.^ Similar pursuits make intimate and 
^ In letter XXXIV. 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 CEstrus curvicauda. At the date of his 
former letter, March 30th, 1771, he seems to have been unaware that it 
had been described by Linnseus as CEstrus bovis, but this impression was 
evidently altered before the date of the present letter to Marsham. — ^Ed. 
* 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 
