Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/260

252 abundant of the flies reared were Helicobia quadriselosa, Sepsis violacea, Nemopoda minuta, Limosina albipennis, Limosina fontinalis, Sphærocera subsultans and Scatophaga furcata, while the most abundant forms captured were Phormia terranovæ and Borborus equinus. In a second class, not including the most abundant forms reared and captured, but including species which were rather abundantly found, were Sarcophaga sarraceniæ, Sarcophaga assidua, Sarcophaga trivialis, Musca domestica (the common house-fly), Morellia micans, Muscina stabulans, Myospila meditabunda, Ophyra leucostoma, Phorbia cinerella, and Spharocera pusilla, of the reared series, and Pseudopyrellia cornicina and Limosina crassimana among the captured series. All the others of the seventy-seven species were either scarce or not abundant.

The results so far stated and the observations made in the investigation as a whole have a distinct entomological interest, as showing the exact food habits of a large number of species, many of the observations

being novel contributions to the previous knowledge of these forms. But the principal bearings of the work are only brought out when we consider which of these forms are likely, from their habits, actually to convey disease germs from the substance in which they have bred or which they have frequented to substances upon which people feed. Therefore, collections of the Dipterous insects (flies) occurring in kitchens, pantries and dining rooms were made, with the assistance of correspondents and observers in different parts of the country, through the summer of 1899, and also in the summer and autumn of 1900. Such collections were made in the States of Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Nebraska and California. Nearly all of the flies thus captured were caught upon sheets of the ordinary sticky fly-paper, which, while ruining them as cabinet specimens, did not disfigure them beyond the point of specific recognition.