LESSON LI.
Reading edition
THE FLY AND ITS WAYS.
1. Here is one of our friends that we know very well—the common house-fly. It is here drawn large on purpose, so that we can better see how it is made.
2. The fly is an insect. Its body is divided into three parts; and it has three pairs of legs. Upon its head are two large eyes, each of which is made up of about two thousand small eyes. When we look through a glass that makes things look large, we can see and count these little eyes of the fly.
3. Its feet are made in such a way that they will stick wherever it places them, so that it can crawl up the walls of the house, or on the ceiling, with its back down.
4. The fly's wings are light and thin, and made up of fine network. It has no jaws or teeth; and, instead of lips, it has a tube, or trunk, through which it sucks up its food, as we can suck milk through a straw.
5. When a fly lights on a lump of sugar, it puts out its trunk, and lets fall a drop of fluid, which is clear like water. This moistens the sugar, and then the fly sucks it up.
A Fly's Leg, magnified.
6. The fly keeps himself very clean. After each meal it brushes its head, first on one side, and then on the other, with its first pair of legs. Then it will rub the two legs together to get off the dirt.
7. The fly lays its eggs in the kind of food its young can eat. In a short time a little white grub hatches out, which does nothing but eat until it is of full size.
8. Then its skin becomes hard, and shrinks. It lies still, and does not eat anything for several days; but, inside its hard shell, wings are growing, and by-and-by the shell cracks open, and a full-grown fly comes out.
9. The blue-bottle fly has but two wings, while the common house-fly has four. This fly lays its eggs wherever it can find putrid meat, and the grubs which hatch out eat it all up, and so save us from evil odors and from breathing foul air.