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The insects are the details that make the groundwork of a summer day. Till the humble-bees are working at the clover it is too silent; so I think we may begin our almanack with the house-fly and the moth and the spider and the ant on the cucumber frame, and so on, till, finally, the catalogue culminates with the great yellow wasp.
I hope you have not been tempted by Satan to do any harm to the little harmless, and often useful, creatures that cross your path. A butterfly, a cockchaffer, a house-fly, a snail, a caterpillar, a worm these, and all others, are God's handy-work; and if you could see them through a glass that magnifies very much indeed, you would be more astonished than I can tell you.
Its former friends have become its sworn enemies. The foremost entomologist of the land has suggested that we even change its name and give it one that would be more suggestive of the abhorence with which we now look upon it. And all these changes have come about because science has turned the microscope on the house-fly and men have studied its habits.
Honey is very cheap; a good large pot of about a gallon, with four fowls, was given for two yards of calico. Buffaloes again bitten by tsetse, and by another fly exactly like the house-fly, but having a straight hard proboscis instead of a soft one; other large flies make the blood run. The tsetse does not disturb the buffaloes, but these others and the smaller flies do.
"There is plenty of physics and chemistry and mechanics about every vital action, but for a complete understanding of it something beyond physics and chemistry is needed." "No mathematics could calculate the orbit of a common house-fly."
Some of these have the same type of sucking mouth-parts and have habits very similar to the house-fly, but as they are usually much less common and as nearly all that has been said in regard to the house-fly would apply equally well to them and as the same measures should be adopted in fighting them they need not be discussed further here.
The meat-fly, house-fly, and horse-fly made themselves promiscuous in every portion of the spray, and what with the rainbow-eyed and ruby-eyed flies, black and silver-banded flower-flies, and other tiny, restless, iridescent atoms of the fly fraternity, the family of Musca was well represented at the feast.
Bees of several species and genera, some unprovided with stings, and some in size scarcely exceeding a house-fly, deposit their honey in hollow trees, or suspend their combs from a branch. The spoils of their industry form one of the chief resources of the uncivilised Veddahs, who collect the wax in the upland forests, to be bartered for arrow points and clothes in the lowlands.
That took two hours a day more. The men used to bring him birds and fish, but on a long cruise he had to satisfy himself with centipedes and cockroaches and such small game. He was the only naturalist I ever met who knew anything about the habits of the house-fly and the mosquito.
Some one opened a window of the house giving on to the lawn, and the last house-fly blundered out into the cold air; and a company of gnats surely the most hardy of insects was dancing in the pale sunlight by the summer-house, above the snow.
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