The Montgomery advertiser., 1908-06-07

once all of our most unchristian
 feelings, while the touch of his tickling feet upon our face or shining crown stirs us to murderous fury. So utterly out of all proportion to any ap- parent injury that he could inflict upon us is this feeling that we have really been inclined to be ashamed of 1t and to take ourselves to task for harboring such vengeful feelings toward so tiny and harmless a creature. It has become a point of minor morals and of saintly pride with us not merely to refrain from killing ny, but even to rescue him tenderly from milky or watery grave in cup or dish.
 But now. in the fulness of time. comes science to prove that our deadly enmity vas right after all and our sentimental good -heartedness mistaken. Sanitary scaence denounces the fly as one of the most important angels of the pestilence ana spreaders of disease and demands its he should be killed, but prevented from coming into existence at all
 FoEtnnateiy with the demand has come tne 9sscoyery. of the means by which it could De carried out to the letter. While sanitarians had for some decades been looking upon the fly with the eye of sus- picion as creature that lives and moves apd has It's being and origin in dirt. and only in dirt, the first convincing object lesson that we had of his real deadiiness Was ID the outbreak of typhoid among 2sar soldiers in the home camps during the spanish American War. Here died on 0ur own soil, in healthfuI climate. with every resource imaginable in the way of food supplies available in abundance. thousands of our boys in khaki. nearly ten times as many as were killed in the neId and at the front during the entire
 Alter the war was over commission of medical experts was appointed to study and report upon the cause, and which was practically unanimous in declaring that ene principal agency in the spread of this qisgraceful pestilence- greatest miii- farE hiunder of our arms in the last half cenfury-was due to the plague of flies which swarmed in all camps not properly protected, feeding upon discharges from earlier cases, which were thrown out into the latrines or regulation trenches for camp sanitation, and then promptly re- turning to crawl over milk, butter, fruit and other food in the unsereened cooking tents and upon unprotected mess tables.
 
 UST to put the possibility of this form of carrying contagion beyond doubt
 flies were allowed to feed upon waste materials inoculatsd with different kinds of bacteria, and then gelatine plates were spread where they could alight upon them These plates were then taken and placed in an incubator, and in from twenty-four to forty-eight hours they developed a most beautiful network of herringbone and polka dot patterns, formed of colonies of bacteria, the seeds of which had been de- ta1 lswxA ( At, eF a.- N1. ny is the original pattern" or ribbon landscape gardener.
 This startled the bacteriological world, and within the next five years a score of similar investigations were carried out on both sides of the Atlantic, always with the same result-that wherever waste material was exposed containing the germs either of simple putrefaction or of disease flies would swarm about and on it and spread the contagion to everything that fly could alight upon for from two hundred to six hundred yards in all direc- tions round about.
 Casual flies, passing about in shops and kitchens, around garbage barrels, stable yards, were caught at random and exam ined, and practically every one of them discovered carried bacteria of some sort upon his hairy legs and feet, and con siderable number of them carried germs of some of our most dangerous diseases. This is an old story now, and time and again flies have been found carrying germs of tuberculosis picked up by them from the sputum, of typhoid, of diph- theria, of blood poisoning, and in the Orient of plague and of cholera. In short, if there is any filth or disease going the fly will go into it and spread it abroad.
 One of the most interesting of recent demonstrations of the deadly activities of the fly was that furnished by that admir- Ialwr kha N0sTV York Committee on the Pollution Of State Waters, of which Edward Hatch, Jr.I IS chairman, having as his associates J. Pier pont Morgan, Dr. Albert Wander Veer, Dr. Daniel D. Jackson and John I. Culver Last summer it made a systematic study of the flies swarming along the water front of lower New York. especially at the points near where sewers empty into the rNer. The results were really appalling. Not only were flies caught in specially pre- pared traps along the water front found to be simply loaded with the germs of filth and disease tone of them having the staggering burden of over 100, 900 bacteria clustered over his tiny body), but on ob- taining from the Health Department ot the city its reports of the cases of deaths from typhoid and other intestinal diseases, particularly the so called summer diar- rhoea" of children, it was found that these cases formed (whiie scattered more or less all over the clty) most unmlStakaDle belt or zone all around the water front at the lower end of the city, covering just about the belt which the short flying fly would range over.
 Further examination showed another deadly parallel, and that was that the number of these diseases increased step by step with the increasing number of flies. though of course a week or so later, and declined in the fall. when the plague of flies snbsided. As the deaths from this class of diseases were more than seven thousand in the Borough of Manhattan last summer--and it would be safe to at- tribute half of these to the agency of hies-it will be seen what deadly record we have to keep with Musca domestica.
 Tn short, the evidence is overwhelming He has been indicted, faithfully and con scientiously tried and found guilty. The sentence is extermination. The only question is-how? Fortunately. the answer is forthcoming. It is entirely within our power. Tn fact, he depends upon us and our ilthiness and careless ness for his very existence.
 k<n MANS foes shall be they of his
 "A own household" is good science
 as well as Scripture. The fly is a domestic animal. a household pet, whether we are proud to aeknowl- edge him or not. With some of our do- mestic animals it is a question whether we adopted them into fine family or thev