Rensselaer Republican, Volume 14, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 May 1882 — Only a Common Fly. [ARTICLE]

Only a Common Fly.

.liO part of fly structure is more wonderful than the mouth. Watch a common fly alight on a piece of sugar. From the under surface of the head, apparently, is unfolded a long organ looking very like an additional leg; and with this structure the fly scrapes the sugar, licks up the cream, spoilates the jam, and, as we shall presently note, effects destruction in other and varied ways. To understand what the organ in question is, let us briefly glance at the typical structure of the # insect-mouth. Four sets of organs or appendages compose the “mouth.” There is first an upper lip, then a pair of large jaws, then a pair of lesser jaws—forming a tube or tongue in butterflies —and last of all a lower lip. In a beetle the chief mouth organs are the greater and lesser jaws; whilst in a bee of wasp the jaws are also well developed for the work of the hive, but the under lip forms a “tongue” wherewith the bee sucks up honey from the flowers. Now, in the fly, the mouth parts are of a modified nature. Speaking generally, the “jaws” are represented by small bristle-like organs, and the upper lip is developed; but it is the labium or under lip which comes to tjie front in the development of the fly’s mouth. Here it forms, as in the bees, the chief organ of nutrition. It is the under lip which we see unfolded from beneath the head when the ily attacks the sugar. And when we place this organ beneath the objectglass of our microscope we can readily dicover the secret of its service. The “tongue,” as we may term the under lip, consists of a stalk highly movable and muscular, at the end of which a couple of broad leaves expand outward from the middle to form a sucker.-like organ, beautifully adapted for licking up fluids and for scratching solid matters also. This fan-like end is supported on a firm tubular framework acting as a set of springs to open and shut the tans, whilst the microscope shows us that this structure is really like a file or rasp in its nature. We can understand, then, readily enough how such a muscular organ can be used for the purposes of fly nourishment. When, after a summer of flies, the morocco covers of our books and the finely polished surfaces of our furniture are scratched and eroded, we can readily appreciate the cause of the damage. The fly’s tongue is a file wherewith it wages war even on ourselves. For, as a famous authority on insects remarks, it is by this means that the fly “teases us in the heat of summer, when it alights on the hand or face to sip the perspiration as it exudes from, and is condensed upon the skin.”

Washington, D. C., May 15th, 1880 Gentlemen —Having been a sufferer for a long time from nervpus prostration and jeneral debility, I was advised to try Hop Bitters. I have taken one bottle and I have been rapidly getting better ever since, and I think it thi< best medicine I ever used. I am now gaining strength and appetite, which was all gone, and I waa in despair until I tried your Bitters. I an* now well, able to go about and do my own work. Before taking it I was completely prostrated.

MRS. MARY STUART.

Montgomery Sears, of Boston, has bought the library of the Germau" poet, Freiligrats. It contains 5,000 volumes, with first editions of Byron’s and Burns’ poems.