Cephenemyia

Will man ever fly around the earth between sunup and dusk? It sounds dubious; but 25 years ago it seemed dubious that he would fly at all.

If he chose to follow the 40th parallel (New York City) around, he would have 13,855 miles to go. If he picked one of the long summer days of the year, he would have about 17 hours in which to get back to his starting point before-daylight left it. He would have to cover 815 miles an hour, or 13% miles a minute, or nearly 400 yards a second.

It sounds dubious; but it was not so long ago that people's hair stood on end at the thought of going "a mile a minute." The latest speed record (Lieutenant A. J. William, U. S. Navy, in a Curtiss hydroplane last fall) is 266 m. p. h., or over "four miles a minute." This speed would not have to be quite doubled to permit an 18-hour circummundane flight on the 60th parallel, which is only 8,312 miles around.

Thoughts like this occur not only to aeronauts, engineers, travelers. The current issue of the Scientific Monthly shows that this particular thought, "around the world in a daylight day," occurred to Dr. Charles H. T. Townsend, a U. S. entomologist stationed at Itaquaquecetuba, Estado de Sao Paulo, Brazil, during his studies of a muscoid fly called Cephenemyia, the world's fastest aeronaut. Much like a bumblebee in size, color and form, Cephenemyia begins life as a larval parasite in the nasal passages or other head cavities of deer, cattle and other ruminants. To find suitable host animals and catch them and get into their noses and out again, the adult flies must range immense tracts of country at terrific speed. To the human eye, their passing is "of such incredible swiftness that one is utterly unable to initiate any movement whatever toward capture" before they vanish from sight. "Form is not sensed by the eye as they pass, but merely a blur or streak of color, and only a fleeting glimpse of that." Dr. Townsend estimates their speed at upwards of 400 yards a second. Arguing that it is certain that what has been attained by animals in the way of locomotion can be equaled, if not exceeded, by machines; that it is from animals that man has discovered all his secrets of automotive economy; and that the possibility of flying 400 yards a second is already written in the mechanism of Cephenemyia, whose tremendous power is stored in extremely reduced bulk and weight--Dr. Townsend advanced the around-the-world-in-a-daylight-day flight not altogether facetiously.