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There is a fly which exteriorly much resembles the house-fly, and which is often very troublesome about this time; this is called the stinging fly, one of the greatest plagues to cattle, as well as to persons wearing thin stockings. Mont Blanc.
Fully an inch in length and bulky in proportion, it somewhat resembles a house-fly on a gigantic scale, but is lustrous grey in colour, with blond eyes, fawn legs, and transparent, iridescent wings, with a brassy glint in them.
In other chapters, particularly the one dealing with the house-fly and typhoid, we shall see how it is that insects are often important factors in spreading some of the most dreaded of the bacterial diseases. The Protozoa, or one-celled animals, belonged to an unknown world before the invention of the microscope.
Although it is generally supposed that the flea is solely responsible for the spread of the bubonic plague and no doubt is the principal distributing agent, the fact must not be overlooked that the house-fly may also be of considerable importance in this connection.
Then, at that magic touch of the west wind the house-fly retires to his own peculiar Inferno, wherever that may be, the mosquito and the gnat pause in their work of darkness and blood to concert fresh and more bloodthirsty deeds, and even the joyous and wicked flea tires of the war dance and lays down his weary head to snatch a hard-earned nap.
It will drive its sharp mandibles into your skin with such force as to take out a bit of the flesh, sometimes causing the blood to flow, but the bite does not seem particularly poisonous, though you feel it at the time and it generally raises a lump on the flesh. The deer-fly belongs to the family of gadflies. It is larger than a house-fly and its wings stand out at right angles to its body.
In a plant of Mr. Ordino's, an ingenious gardener at Newark, who is possessed of a great collection of plants, I saw many flowers of an Apocynum with three dead flies in each; they are a thin-bodied fly, and rather less than the common house-fly; but I have seen two or three other sorts of flies thus arrested by the plant. Aug. 12, 1788." Additional note on Ilex.
There is no doubt whatever that the house-fly is a main source of the dissemination of the microbe of infantile diarrhoea, and the cause annually of hundreds of thousands of deaths of children in the great cities of Europe and America.
This morning, while lying awake from four to five o'clock, I almost hated the sparrows, they were there in such multitudes, and so loud and persistent sounded their jangling through the open window. It set me thinking of the England of the future of a time a hundred years hence, let us say when there will remain with us only two representatives of feral life the sparrow and the house-fly.
It is only within the last thirty or forty years that such cleanliness of body and of clothing and of house-fittings as will banish parasitic insects has become at all general. The common house-fly is still tolerated, although it is a notorious carrier of dirt and disease, and is bred by dirt and dirt only, its eggs being hatched in old stable manure.
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