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Let not these expressions, however accurate, mislead us into believing for a moment that the Sarcophagae are the bold company of master tainters who haunt our dwellings, more particularly in autumn, and plant their vermin in our ill-guarded viands. The author of those offences is Calliphora vomitoria, the bluebottle, who is of a stouter build and arrayed in darkest blue.
"It is a very large fly indeed," said Hudelist, with a grin. "I do not believe that it is a bluebottle fly," exclaimed the emperor. "It is Bonaparte, who has transformed himself into a bluebottle fly, as Jove once transformed himself into an ox; and he came hither to annoy me and din my ears until I am quite sick.
It was a bluebottle that roused him. It floundered heavily against the bars, crawled through, and brushed across his nose. No! he was not dead yet, but the bluebottle soon would be. He leaped at it, and, to his amazement, fell short and missed. Yesterday, he had cleared a flight of stairs with one light-hearted bound, and left a bewildered kitten at the top.
The fineness of the probe equals the fineness of the aperture. But, if the beak were entirely closed, where would the eggs be laid then? With a tied thread, I keep the two mandibles in absolute contact; and I place a second bluebottle in the presence of the linnet, which the colonists have already entered by the beak.
In the fields the men were harvesting the ripened oats and barley, and The sound of their machines clattering, now low, now loud, came to his ears. Flies buzzed near him, and a king bird clattered overhead. He noticed again, as he had many a time when a boy, that The softened sound of The far-off reaper was at times exactly like The hum of a bluebottle fly buzzing heedlessly about his ears.
On the top of the contents, I sprinkle the eggs of the bluebottle, eggs free from the least stain, taken from those laid on the outside of tins baited with meat and not absolutely shut. A similar test-tube is filled with white of egg, but receives no germs. Both are closed with a plug of cotton-wool and left in a dark corner.
There were pleasant cracklings of burning pine sticks and the sizzle of frying bacon. Great swarms of bluebottle flies buzzed lazily in the warm sunshine. Sometimes, across a pool of noonday silence, we heard birds singing; for the birds didn't desert us. When we gave them a hearing, they did their cheery little best to assure us that everything would come right in the end.
After dinner she went resolutely into the parlor, and sitting down on her little low chair, pressed her fingers over her eyes to shut out any possible distractions. "Now," she said, "I will make up my mind." A bluebottle fly buzzing up and down the window dropped on the sill, then began to buzz again.
I know that she has one exterminator in the person of the tiny Saprinus beetle, a fisher of fat sausages on the edge of the pools formed by liquescent corpses. Here swarm in common the grubs of the greenbottle, the flesh fly and the bluebottle. The Saprinus draws them to him from the bank and gobbles them indiscriminately. They represent to him morsels of equal value.
Fancy Noah occupied in a wild-goose chase, or selecting specimens from a wasps' or hornets' nest, or giving assiduous chase to a vigilant and elusive bluebottle fly! But suppose Noah to have succeeded in his arduous enterprise, the question still remains, how did he keep his wonderful zoological collection alive?
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