[Illustration: FIG. 37--One use for the house-fly.]
1. Baby-Bye, Here's a fly; We will watch him, you and I. How he crawls Up the walls, Yet he never falls! I believe with six such legs You and I could walk on eggs. There he goes On his toes, Tickling Baby's nose.
The page shown in Fig. 37 was copied from one of our old second readers and shows something of the spirit in which we used to regard the house-fly. A few of them were nice things to have around to make things seem "homelike." Of course they sometimes became too friendly during the early morning hours when we were trying to take just one more little nap or they were sometimes too insistent for their portion of the dinner after it had been placed on the table, but a screen over the bed would help us out a little in the morning and a long fly-brush cut from a tree in the yard or made of strips of paper tacked to a stick or, still more fancy, made of long peacock plumes, would help to drive them from the table. Those that were knocked into the coffee or the cream could be fished out; those that went into the soup or the hash were never missed!
Not only were the flies regarded as splendid things with which to amuse the baby, but they were thought to be very useful as scavengers as they were often seen feeding on all kinds of refuse in the yard. Then, too, they seemed to be cleanly little things, for almost any time some of them could be seen brushing their heads and bodies with their legs and evidently having a good clean-up. More than that it never occurred to us that it would be possible to get rid of them even should it be thought advisable, for they came from "out doors," and who could kill all the flies "out doors"?
Fortunately, or otherwise, these halcyon days have gone by and the common, innocent, friendly little house-fly is now an outcast convicted of many crimes and accused of a long list of others (Fig. 38).
Its former friends have become its sworn enemies. The foremost entomologist of the land has suggested that we even change its name and give it one that would be more suggestive of the abhorence with which we now look upon it.
[Illustration: FIG. 38--The house-fly (_Musca domestica_).]
And all these changes have come about because science has turned the microscope on the house-fly and men have studied its habits. We know now that as the fly is "tickling baby's nose" it may be spreading there where they may be inhaled or where they may be taken into the baby's mouth thousands of germs some of which may cause some serious disease. We know that as they are buzzing about our faces while we are trying to sleep they may, unwittingly, be in the same nefarious business, and we know that as they sip from our cups with us or bathe in our coffee or our soup or walk daintily over our beefsteak or frosted cake they are leaving behind a trail of filth and bacteria, and we know that some of these germs may be and often are the cause of some of our common diseases. As the typhoid germs are very often distributed in this way, Dr. Howard has suggested that the house-fly shall be known in the future as the typhoid-fly, not because it is solely responsible for the spread of typhoid, but because it is such an important factor in it and is so dangerous from every point of view. The names "manure fly" and "privy fly" have also been suggested and would perhaps serve just as well, as the only object in giving it another name would be to find a more repulsive one to remind us constantly of the filthy and dangerous habits of the fly.