The house-fly : Musca domestica Linn. its structure, habits, development, relation to disease and control / by C. Gordon Hewitt.

  • Hewitt, C. Gordon (Charles Gordon), 1885-1920.
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The house-fly : Musca domestica Linn. its structure, habits, development, relation to disease and control / by C. Gordon Hewitt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    habits and development of the fly. It was natural that h<- should make some errors, such its mistaking the brown for the kidneys, in attempting to describe the anatomy at -i early a date of our knowledge of morphology and methods of study. Notwithstanding these limitations, Gleichen’s was still the most comprehensive and detailed account of the house-fly when I commenced to study the insect. A short popular account of the house-fly was published, con- jointly with that of the earth-worm, by Samuelson and Hicks in 1860, in a book entitled Humble Creatures. Though inte- resting, the account is very superficial and contains much that is inaccurate. In 1874 Packard wrote a fairly complete account of the de- velopmental history of the house-fly as observed in Massachusetts, U.S.A., and in 1880 Taschenberg gave a good popular account of the insect and its breeding habits in his Praktische Insekten- kunde. Howard gave a short account of the life-history of the house- fly in a bulletin on household insects, published in 1896 by the United States Department of Agriculture, and he gave a further account in 1900, in a valuable paper on the insect fauna of human excrement. Newstead, in 1907, gave a preliminary report of his study of the development and breeding-places of the house-fly in the city of Liverpool, and a second report was published in 1909. Space forbids the enumeration of the countless papers and accounts of the house-fly which have been written during the past two or three years. Some of these contain original infor- mation, the majority of them do not. Of recent publications, Howard’s popular book on the house-fly (1911) should be men- tioned, not only as being a complete account of the insect and its disease-carrying powers, but because it contains many original observations1. Special reference should be made to the valuable series of papers published in connection with an inquiry carried out by the Local Government Board on flies as carriers of infection. 1 Since the above lines were written Graham-Smith has given an excellent account of the disease-carrying powers of the non-blood-sucking flies in his Flics and Disease (1913); see Bibliography.