Note 7 — Chapter II · SAPRINI, DERMESTES AND OTHERS

Seeing them so active, one at first pictures them as occupied with family-cares. So I believed; and I was wrong. Under the carrion in my necrotic laboratory, there is never an egg belonging to them, never a larva. The family must be established elsewhere, in the dung-hills and dust-heaps apparently. I have, in fact, found their nymphs, which are easily recognized, in March, on the floor of a poultry-run saturated with the droppings of the fowls. The adults visit my retting-pans to feast upon the maggot. When their mission is accomplished, in the late autumn, they seem to return to the filth under whose shelter the generation is prepared which, as soon as winter is over, hastens to the dead bodies of animals to moderate the excesses of the Sarcophagæ7 and the Luciliæ.