caped my attention, I inspect the contents of the jar from
top to bottom. Meat and sand contain neither larvae nor pupae: the whole
is absolutely deserted.

The layer of sand being only a finger's-breadth thick, this experiment
requires certain precautions. The meat may expand a little, in going
bad, and protrude in one or two places. However small the fleshy eyots
that show above the surface, the flies come to them and breed. Sometimes
also the juices oozing from the putrid meat soak a small extent of the
sandy floor. That is enough for the maggot's first establishment. These
causes of failure are avoided with a layer of sand about an inch thick.
Then the bluebottle, the flesh fly and other flies whose grubs batten on
dead bodies are kept at a proper distance.

In the hope of awakening us to a proper sense of our insignificance,
pulpit orators sometimes make an unfair use of the grave and its worms.
Let us put no faith in their doleful rhetoric. The chemistry of man's
final dissolution is eloquent enough of our emptiness: there is no need
to add imaginary horrors. The worm of the sepulchre is an invention of
cantankerous minds, incapable of seeing things as they are. Covered by
but a few inches of earth, the dead can sleep their quiet sleep: no fly
will ever come to take advantage of them.

At the surface of the soil, exposed to the air, the hideous invasion
is possible; ay, it is the invariable rule. For the melting down and
remolding of matter, man is no better, corpse for corpse, than the
lowest of the brutes. Then the fly exercises her rights and deals with
us as she does with any ordinary animal refuse. Nature treats us with
magnificent indifference in her great regenerating factory: placed in
her crucibles, animals and men, beggars and kings are one and all alike.
There you have true equality, the only equality in this world of ours:
equality in the presence of the maggot.

CHAPTER XV. THE BLUEBOTTLE: THE GRUB

The larvae of the bluebottle hatch within two days in the warm weather.
Whether inside my apparatus, in direct contact with the piece of meat,
or outside, on the edge of a slit that enables them to enter, they set
to work at once. They do not eat, in the strict sense of the word,
that is to say, they do not tear their food, do not chew it by means of
implements of mastication. Their mouth parts do not lend themselves to
this sort of work. These mouth parts are two horny spikes, sliding one
upon