From the Ormskirk Advertiser, Thursday 23 July 1857.

HOW TO CATCH FLIES —Take a number vessels, jars, mugs, or tumblers, fill them half full with soapy water, cover them as jam pots are covered, with a piece of paper, either tied down or tucked under. This paper must rubbed inside with wet sugar, treacle, honey, or jam—in fact anything sweet, and it must have a small hole cut in the centre, just large enough for a fly to enter. The result is, that if these traps be placed in different parts of room, a tent, or hut, or anywhere else, the flies will settle upon the top, induced the smell of the bait. They will crawl through the hole in the top and feed upon the sweet beneath. Meanwhile the heat of the weather causes the soapy water ferment, and produces gas, which overpowers the flies, and they drop down into the vessel. I have myself caught by these means a dozen tumblers half full of a solid mass of flies—each containing thousands —in a jar, and have thereby kept my room almost entirely free from them.—Letter in The Times