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The bush-tick is a more highly specialized, certainly a more degraded, creature than the bird-fly, and the very fact of its existence seems to show that it is possible for even the lowest of the fallen race of parasites to start afresh in life under new conditions, and to reascend in the scale of being, although still bearing about it the marks of former degeneracy.
A man with a blood-sucking flat-bodied flying squirrel, concealing itself among his clothing and gliding and dodging all over his body with so much artifice and rapidity as to defeat all efforts made to capturo it or knock it off, would be a case parallel to that of the bird-fly on the small bird.
With the bird-fly it has not occurred, as far as we know; but in the past history of some independent parasites it is possible that something similar to the imaginary case I have sketched may have taken place.
Perhaps the habits of the bird-fly I have mentioned will serve to show how, in some cases, the free life of some blood-sucking flies and other insects might have originated.
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