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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
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