nderful procreating
machinery boasted by the Flesh flies. It is a spiral ribbon, a velvety
scroll whose nap is a sort of fleece of maggots set closely together
and each cased in a sheath. The patient biographer counted the host:
it numbers, he tells us, nearly twenty thousand. You are seized with
stupefaction at this anatomical fact.

How does the gray fly find the time to settle a family of such
dimensions, especially in small packets, as she has just done on my
window sill? What a number of dead dogs, moles and snakes must she not
visit before exhausting her womb! Will she find them? Corpses of much
size do not abound to that extent in the country. As everything suits
her, she will alight on other remains of minor importance. Should the
prize be a rich one, she will return to it tomorrow, the day after and
later still, over and over again. In the course of the season, by dint
of packets of grubs deposited here, there and everywhere, she will
perhaps end by housing her entire brood. But then, if all things
prosper, what a glut, for there are several families born during
the year! We feel it instinctively: there must be a check to these
generative enormities. Let us first consider the grub. It is a sturdy
maggot, easy to distinguish from the greenbottle's by its larger girth
and especially by the way in which its body terminates behind. There is
here a sudden breaking off, hollowed into a deep cup. At the bottom of
this crater are two breathing holes, two stigmata with amber-red tips.
The edge of the cavity is fringed with half a score of pointed, fleshy
festoons, which diverge like the spikes of a coronet. The creature
can close or open this diadem at will by bringing the denticulations
together or by spreading them out wide. This protects the air holes
which might otherwise be choked up when the maggot disappears in the sea
of broth. Asphyxia would supervene, if the two breathing holes at the
back became obstructed. During the immersion, the festooned coronet
shuts like a flower closing its petals and the liquid is not admitted to
the cavity.

Next follows the emergence. The hind part reappears in the air, but
appears alone, just at the level of the fluid. Then the coronet spreads
out afresh, the cup gapes and assumes the aspect of a tiny flower, with
the white denticulations for petals and the two bright red dots, the
stigmata at the bottom, for stamens. When the grubs, pressed one
against the other, with their hea