WARBLE FLY. 
89 
the plan of treatment we are adopting in choking the maggots, to find 
that in regular medical practice, on the human subject, the application 
of some kind of treatment simply to exclude air is all that is necessary 
to kill these allied kinds of maggots in a few hours. 
The matter of the intense itching is well worth consideration. 
From information from various quarters, and from what I have seen 
myself, the cattle appear to lick themselves as far as they can manage 
to reach when the warbles are appearing : if this is a constant habit 
in bad attack, it would be a guide to its presence, and an additional 
reason why the applications of grease mentioned in the following notes 
as a remedy should be useful, for it would at once sooth the pain, as 
well as kill the maggot. 
Applications for destroying maggots in the warble, and for preventing or 
lessening amount of attack to the cattle in fly-time. 
Observations have been sent in of the safe and successful use of 
mercurial ointment for killing the maggot in the warble from various 
cattle owners and others who have used it up to the amount of appli¬ 
cation to 250 head of cattle in a herd of 800. In these cases the 
ointment has been used as advised in previous publications, as 
a small touch on the opening of the warble; by no means as a large 
dab, nor as a smear, nor where warbles were gradually showing, as an 
application to be made repeatedly over a large surface of warbled hide. 
Only one instance in which bad consequences followed the application 
has been reported to me, of which it is unnecessary to repeat the 
account again here, the details, comments, and opinions thereon 
having been already given in the ‘Agricultural Gazette’ for 1885, 
Nos. 598, 599, and 601, and likewise in other leading agricultural 
journals of that date. 
Used with caution the mercurial ointment has been found 
thoroughly serviceable, but, as a general application safe in all hands, 
McDougall’s “ Dip ” or “ Smear ” has proved excellently useful. At 
my request Messrs. Carruthers and Co., Lancaster, forwarded tins of 
the “Dipping Smear” to various localities where the mixture could 
be tried by my own correspondents on their own herds, or the cattle 
under their care ; and all the reports sent me have spoken quite 
satisfactorily of this mixture as a sure and safe method of killing the 
maggot in the warble. 
The experiment of application of cart-grease is well worth observa¬ 
tion, as this is a material which can be left standing anywhere about 
farm-buildings, always at hand, and very cheap, and it may be 
smeared in all directions by the most careless hands with little loss 
and no risk. 
