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kine, where the maggots, when hatched, eat their way thro’ the 
hide of the beast into it’s flesh, & grow to a large size. 9 10 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, & filled with purulent matter. Once myself I saw a 
large, rough maggot of this sort squezed 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, & a single one worry bree. 
No doubt they mean a breese, or breeze , the name for the gad-fly, 
or oestrus, the parent of these maggots, which lays it’s eggs along 
the backs of kine. 
But to return to the fern-owl. The least attention & observa- 
tion would convince men that these poor birds neither injure the 
goat-heard, nor the grazier; but that they arc perfectly harmless, 
& subsist alone on night-moths, & beetles; & thro’ the month 
of July mostly on the scarabcens solstitialis, the small tree- 
beetle, which in many districts flies & abounds at that season. 
Thoso that wo have opened have always had their craws stuffed 
with large night moths, & pieces of chafers : nor does it any wise 
appear, how they can, weak Sc unarmed as they are, inflict any malady 
on kine, unless they possess the powers of animal magnetism, & 
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. 10 Similar pursuits make intimate & 
9 In letter XXXIV to Pennant, as well as in the “Observations on Insects 
and Vermes,” this insect is noticed by White under the name GEstrus 
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 CEstrus bovis 
but this impression was evidently altered before the date of the present letter 
to Marsham. — J. E. H. 
10 This was so. Stillingfleet refers to him as his “ very worthy and 
ingenious friend Robert Marsham,” and speaks in high terms of the hospi- 
table treatment that he experienced at Stratton. See the other letters of the 
present series. The ‘Calendar of Flora,’ made in 1755 and published in 
1761, will be found alluded to in Letter XII to Pennant. — J. E. H. 
Benjamin Stillingfleet, the author of this work and of ‘Miscellaneous 
Tracts relating to Natural History, Husbandry and Physics,’ was born in 
1702 and died in 1 771. — A. N. 
o 2 
