interfere, she persuades herself to dab a few
eggs under the axilla of a plucked bird or in the groin, two points at
which the skin is thinner than elsewhere.

With her maternal foresight, the bluebottle knows to perfection the
choice surfaces, the only ones liable to soften and run under the
influence of the reagent dribbled by the newborn grubs. The chemistry
of the future is familiar to her, though she does not use it for her own
feeding; motherhood, that great inspirer of instinct, teaches her all
about it.

Scrupulous though she be in choosing exactly where to lay her eggs, the
bluebottle does not trouble about the quality of the provisions intended
for her family's consumption. Any dead body suits her purpose. Redi, the
Italian scientist who first exploded the old, foolish notion of worms
begotten of corruption, fed the vermin in his laboratory with meat of
very different kinds. In order to make his tests the more conclusive,
he exaggerated the largess of the dining hall. The diet was varied with
tiger and lion flesh, bear and leopard, fox and wolf, mutton and beef,
horseflesh, donkey flesh and many others, supplied by the rich menagerie
of Florence. This wastefulness was unnecessary: wolf and mutton are all
the same to an unprejudiced stomach.

A distant disciple of the maggot's biographer, I look at the problem
in a light which Redi never dreamt of. Any flesh of one of the higher
animals suits the fly's family. Will it be the same if the food supplied
be of a lower organism and consist of fish, for instance, of frog,
mollusk, insect, centipede? Will the worms accept these viands and,
above all, can they manage to liquefy them, which is the first and
foremost condition?

I serve a piece of raw whiting. The flesh is white, delicate, partly
translucent, easy for our stomachs to digest and no less suited to the
grub's dissolvent. It turns into an opalescent fluid, which runs like
water. In fact, it liquefies in much the same way as hard-boiled white
of egg. The worms at first wax fat, as long as the conditions allow of
some solid eyots remaining; then, when foothold fails, threatened with
drowning in the too fluid broth, they creep up the side of the glass,
anxious and restless to be off. They climb to the cotton-wool stopper of
the test-tube and try to bolt through the wadding. Endowed with stubborn
perseverance, nearly all of them decamp in spite of the obstacle. The
test-tube with the white of egg showed me a