ey do not
even attempt to slide their ovipositor through the slits of the folds.
The favourable season passes and not an egg is laid on the tempting
wrappers. All the mothers abstain, judging the slender obstacle of the
paper to be more than the vermin will be able to overcome.

This caution on the Fly's part does not at all surprise me: motherhood
everywhere has great gleams of perspicacity. What does astonish me is
the following result. The parcels containing the Linnets are left for a
whole year uncovered on the table; they remain there for a second year
and a third. I inspect the contents from time to time. The little birds
are intact, with unrumpled feathers, free from smell, dry and light,
like mummies. They have become not decomposed, but mummified.

I expected to see them putrefying, running into sanies, like corpses
left to rot in the open air. On the contrary, the birds have dried and
hardened, without undergoing any change. What did they want for their
putrefaction? simply the intervention of the Fly. The maggot,
therefore, is the primary cause of dissolution after death; it is,
above all, the putrefactive chemist.

A conclusion not devoid of value may be drawn from my paper game-bags.
In our markets, especially in those of the South, the game is hung
unprotected from the hooks on the stalls. Larks strung up by the dozen
with a wire through their nostrils, Thrushes, Plovers, Teal,
Partridges, Snipe, in short, all the glories of the spit which the
autumn migration brings us, remain for days and weeks at the mercy of
the Flies. The buyer allows himself to be tempted by a goodly exterior;
he makes his purchase and, back at home, just when the bird is being
prepared for roasting, he discovers that the promised dainty is alive
with worms. O horror! There is nothing for it but to throw the
loathsome, verminous thing away.

The Bluebottle is the culprit here. Everybody knows it, and nobody
thinks seriously of shaking off her tyranny: not the retailer, nor the
wholesale dealer, nor the killer of the game. What is wanted to keep
the maggots out? Hardly anything: to slip each bird into a paper
sheath. If this precaution were taken at the start, before the Flies
arrive, any game would be safe and could be left indefinitely to attain
the degree of ripeness required by the epicure's palate.

Stuffed with olives and myrtleberries, the Corsican Blackbirds are
exquisite eating. We sometimes receive them at Orange, layer