What is their number to one mother? I have already spoken of a deposit of three hundred, counted egg by egg. A quite fortuitous circumstance enabled me to go much farther. In the first week of January 1905, we experienced a sudden short cold snap of a severity very exceptional in my part of the country. The thermometer fell to twelve degrees below zero. While a fierce north wind was raging and beginning to redden the leaves of the olive trees, came one and brought me a barn or screech owl, which he had found on the ground, exposed to the air, not far from my house. My reputation as a lover of animals made the donor believe that I should be pleased with his gift. I was, as a matter of fact, but for reasons whereof the finder certainly never dreamt. The owl was untouched, with trim feathers and not the least wound that showed. Perhaps he had died of cold. What made me gratefully accept the present was exactly that which would have inclined anyone but myself to refuse it. The owl's eyes, glazed in death, were hidden under a thick mass of eggs, which I recognized as a bluebottle's. Similar masses occupied the vicinity of the nostrils. If I wanted maggots, here, of a certainty, was a richer crop than I had ever beheld. I place the corpse on the sand of a pan, with a wire gauze cover, and leave events to take their course. The laboratory in which I install my bird is none other than my study. It is as cold in there, or nearly, as outside, so much so that the water in the aquarium in which I used to rear caddis worms has frozen into a solid block of ice. Under these conditions of temperature, the owl's eyes keep their white veil of germs unchanged. Nothing stirs, nothing swarms. Weary of waiting, I pay no more attention to the carcass; I leave the future to decide whether the cold has exterminated the fly's family or not. Before the end of March, the packets of eggs have disappeared, I know not how long. The bird, for that matter, seems to be intact. On the ventral surface, which is turned to the air, the feathers keep their smooth arrangement and their fresh coloring. I lift the thing. It is light, very dry and gives a hard sound, like an old shoe tanned by the summer sun in the fields. There is no smell. The dryness has vanquished the stench, which, in any case, was never offensive during that time of frost. On the other hand, the back, which touched the sand, is a loathsome wreck, partly deprived of its feathers. The quills of the tail are bare barreled; a few whitened bones show, deprived of their muscles. The skin has turned into a dark leather, pierced with round holes like those of a sieve. It is all hideously ugly, but most instructive.