Pheidippides

“ Three species commonly attack man. Strangely enough, there are very few accurate data regarding their life history.
Pediculus humanus (fig. 65) , the head louse, is the most widely distributed. It is usually referred to in medical literature as Pediculus capitis, but the Linnean specific name has priority. In color it is of a pale gray, blackish on the margins. It is claimed by some authors that the color varies according to the color of the skin of the host. The abdomen is composed of seven distinct segments, bearing spiracles laterally. There is considerable variation in size. ”

“ The average for the nineteen genera is 13.9 segments in the thorax, 3.7 segments in the pygidium, or a total average of 17.6 segments in the trunk. Crepicephalus with 12-14 segments in the thorax and 4-6 in the pygidium, and Protypus, with 13 in the thorax and 4-6 in the pygidium, are the only genera which approach the average. All of the Mesonacidæ, except one, Olenelloides, have far more thoracic and fewer pygidial segments than the average, while the reverse is true of the Eodiscidæ, Vanuxemella, Corynexochus, Bathyuriscus, and Poliella. ”

“ We will confine our attention to the second genus, Pediculus, which contains two species parasitic upon man— (Pediculus capitis) the hair-louse and (Pediculus vestimenti) the body-louse. Both of these are extremely difficult to rear in captivity, though in their natural state they abound and multiply to an amazing degree.
Wherever human beings are gathered together in large numbers, with infrequent opportunities of changing their clothes, P. vestimenti is sure to spread. It does not [3] arise, as the uninformed think, from dirt, though it flourishes best in dirty surroundings. ”

“ With her strong hard-cased body an inch and a half long, borne on powerful wings that expand fully three inches, and her long and strong needle-pointed sting that darts in and out like a flash and is always full of virulent poison, Pepsis is certainly queen of all the wasp amazons. But if that is so, no less is Eurypelma greatest, most dreadful, and fiercest, and hence king, of all the spiders in this country. In South America and perhaps elsewhere in the tropics, live the fierce bird-spiders with thick legs extending three inches or more on each side of their ugly hairy bodies. ”

“ As expected, there are five pairs on the pygidium. The cephalon is unfortunately so exfoliated that the appendifers there are not preserved. The doublure of the pygidium is extremely narrow.
The cast of the interior shows, rather faintly, the exopodites of the right side of the thorax and of the left side of the cephalon, and, still more faintly, the caudal rami and a few pygidial endopodites. The exopodites on the right side are in what seems to be the customary position, directed obliquely forward and outward, and the tips of their distal lobes project slightly beyond the edge of the test. ”

“ There is but little to be said about lesser female characters, such as nurses, in the plays. The nurse of the Medea is merely an old and trusty but somewhat sententious servant. The nurse of Phædra is the prototype of Juliet's nurse, a person in whom attachment and complaisance replace morality, and who in the Hippolytus is dramatically very useful by conveying the declaration which Phædra is too noble and modest to utter. This delicacy in the drawing of Phædra was lost upon Seneca and Racine, who degrade her to be her own advocate before the astonished Hippolytus. ”

“ She ran at the new prey, too corpulent to try to avoid pursuit, seized it with her mandibles by the saddle-shaped corslet, got astride, and curving her abdomen, passed its end under the ephippiger’s thorax. There doubtless the stings are given, but the difficulty of observation prevents me from telling how many. The ephippiger—gentle victim—lets itself be operated on unresistingly, like the dull sheep of our slaughter-houses. The Sphex takes her time and manœuvres her lancet with a deliberation favourable to the observer ”

“ Internal organs which are hidden from sight are sometimes represented—a characteristic of modern Pueblo art, where, as in pictures of antelopes, it is not uncommon to find the heart and œsophagus, or even the intestinal tract, drawn as if the animal were transparent. In a figure of a bird shown on plate LIX in my preliminary account of Sikyatki, where the artist apparently had no available space in which to represent the extremity of the tail, it is bent upward, and the tips of three feathers conventionalized into three triangles, one of the symbols of wing feathers, as elsewhere shown. ”

“ Three white feathers fluttered out of the box, swayed and rocked for a moment in the air, and then, one after another, settled gently down upon the floor. They lay like flakes of snow upon the dark polished boards. But they were not whiter than Harry Feversham's cheeks. He stood and stared at the feathers until he felt a light touch upon his arm. He looked and saw Ethne's gloved hand upon his sleeve. ”

“ It is a passing flash of indignation at the trap in which he has been caught. When the time comes he keeps his oath at the cost of his life. Yet the line is repeatedly cited as showing the dreadful doctrines of Euripides and the sophists; doctrines that would justify any perjury!
The Hippolytus, as we have it, is a rewritten play. In his first version Euripides had a scene in which Phaedra actually declared her love. This more obvious treatment was preferred by Seneca and Racine; but Euripides in his second thoughts reached a far more austere and beautiful effect. ”

“ The appendages are not known, but the test is in some ways like that of a trilobite. The thorax, abdomen, and pygidium are especially like those of certain trilobites, and there is no greater differentiation between thorax and abdomen than there is between the regions before and behind the fifteenth segment of a Pædeumias or Mesonacis. The anal segment is directly comparable to the pygidium of a Ceraurus, the stiff unsegmented uropods being like the great lateral spines of that genus. ”

“ But the grand conceptions of Phidias, full of majesty and of grandeur as they are—the matchless finish of the works of Apelles and Praxiteles, ravishing the senses with their carnal beauty, still lacked one element, without which art can never reveal itself in the full perfection of its latent capabilities. ”

“ As in other specimens, the endopodites of the thorax turn backward at the distal end of the carpopodite, which is broad and curved, and bears a tuft of spines on the posterior margin. The dactylopodites seem to preserve their natural shape, and are very nearly cylindrical in form. Under the pygidium are several sets of overlapping fringes of setæ of exopodites, and along the edge of the dorsal furrow, a number of fragments of segments of what may be coxopodites while with them are a number of fragmentary shaft of exopodites. ”

“ That a large pygidium is not essential to perfect protection on enrollment is shown by an equally perfect adjustment of the two shields in some families with small pygidia, notably the Harpedidæ and Cheiruridæ That the large pygidial shields are not for protective purposes only is also shown by those forms with large pygidia which are not adjusted to the conformation of the cephalon, as in the Goldiidæ and Lichadidæ. It is evident that a large pygidium, while useful to complete protection on enrollment, is not essential. ”

“ This species follows a course similar to that of D. socialis, so that the full series of stages need not be described. The pygidium is, however, of especial interest, for there is a stage in which it shows two more segments than in the adult. Troedsson figures a pygidium 1.28 mm. long which has eight pairs of pleural ribs, while the adult has only six pairs. The ends of all these ribs are free spines, and were the development not known one would say that this was a case of incipient fusion, while as a matter of fact, it is incipient freedom. ”

“ In Ceraurus, Calymene, and Isotelus, the endopodites of the pygidium are similar to those of the thorax, but seemingly more slender, with less well developed coxopodites, and with, in the last-named genus, slender cylindrical segments. Exopodites are not known on the pygidia of any of these genera, but since they are present and like those of the thorax in Triarthrus, Cryptolithus, Neolenus, and Ptychoparia, there is little reason to think that they were absent in Ceraurus or Calymene, though there is some question about Isotelus. ”

“ The mid-region of the body, composed of jointed segments, is followed by a larger or smaller region consisting of fused segments and termed the pygidium or caudal shield, which in some cases is as large as the head-shield itself, in other cases much smaller. When the pygidium is large and composed of many segments, the number of free body segments is correspondingly reduced, and vice versa. It is with respect to this number of segments that respectively constitute the pygidium and the mid-region of the body that Trilobites differ most markedly from each other ”

“ If the large pygidium is primitive, then multisegmentation in trilobites can not be primitive but is the result of adaptation to a crawling life. It is annelid-like, but is not in itself to be relied upon as showing relationship to the Chætopoda. Simple trilobites with few segments, like the Agnostidæ, Eodiscidæ etc., were, therefore, properly placed by Beecher at [139] the base of his classification, and there is now less chance than ever that they can be called degenerate animals. ”

“ Ground-color of the lower parts white, each feather with a medial stripe of black, this throwing off distinct bars to the edge of the feather; the medial black is largest on sides of the breast, where it expands into very large conspicuous spots, having a slight rusty exterior suffusion; the abdomen medially, the anal region, and the lower tail-coverts, are almost unvaried white. ”

“ There is considerable variation in the width of the axial lobe. It is narrowest in Ptychoparia, where in the middle it is only 14 per cent of the whole width, and widest in Solenopleura, where it is 28 per cent. In Ptychoparia the pygidium of the protaspis occupies from 18 to 22 per cent of the whole length. In the adult it occupies 10 to 12 per cent. In Solenopleura it makes up about 26 per cent of the protaspis, and in the adult about 8 per cent.
In the youngest stages of all these trilobites, the pygidium is incompletely separated from the cephalon. ”

“ On the whole, the Epectinata are highly specialized and degenerate forms, though there are few, if any, animals which surpass the spiders in rapidity of movement, deadliness of attack and constructive instincts.
Order 2. Pedipalpi (figs. 54 to 59) .—Appendages of 1st pair bisegmented, without poison gland; of 2nd pair prehensile, their basal segments underlying the proboscis, and furnished with sterno-coxal (maxillary) process, the apical segment tipped with a single movable or immovable claw ”

“ And again, Euripides will not allow us to dislike even his worst women. No one can help siding with Medea; and many of us love Phædra—even when she has lied an innocent man's life away.
It is a step from this championship of women to the other thing that roused fury against Euripides—his interest in the sex question in all its forms. There are plays based on questions of marriage-breaking, like the Hippolytus and Stheneboia*—in which the heroine acted to Bellerophon as Potiphar's wife to Joseph. ”

“ A female Ephippiger is stung at the median point, just a little in front of the fore-legs. Convulsive movements lasting for a few seconds are followed by a fall to one side, with pulsations of the abdomen, flutterings of the antennae and a few feeble movements of the legs. The tarsi cling firmly to the hair-pencil which I hold out to them. I place the insect on its back. It lies motionless. Its state is absolutely the same as that to which the Languedocian Sphex (Cf. "Insect Life": chapter 10.—Translator's Note.) reduces her Ephippigers. ”

“ They are usually darker colored, especially on the head and front part of the body; and [Pg 87] markings which are distinct in the female run together and become darker in the male. In most species these differences are not great; [Pg 88] but in some no one would ever suppose, without other evidence, that the males and females had any relationship to each other. The most extreme cases of this kind are Argiope and Nephila, where the male is about a tenth as large as the female. Fig. 43 represents male and female of Nephila plumipes described by Wilder. ”

“ The heroes of Phidias are simply representations of such noble human persons as he every day saw, and the gods of Phidias simply representations of such noble divine persons as he thoroughly believed to exist, and did in mental vision truly behold. ”

“ Pewit—phoebe, pewit—phoebe, he calls continually. As he perches on the peak of a building or other point of vantage, notice how vigorously he wags his tail when he calls, and turns his head this way and that, to keep an eye in all directions lest a bite should fly by him unawares. ”

“ Having in this way reduced the prey to a rounded ball, in which its limbs are hardly distinguishable, the spider takes it in her jaws and mounts to her place.
A single fly of ordinary size seems to occupy a whole day in the eating. When finished, the remains are cast down as a pellet, so perfectly deprived of moisture, that it is probable that this species, like the Nephila, and perhaps all Epeiridæ, sucks out the gum of its old net and reëlaborates it in her organs for use in making a new one. ”

“ When the female spider is nearly full grown, there appears a hard, swollen place just in front of the opening of the ovaries, Fig. 1; and, after the last moult, the epigynum is uncovered at this place. The epigynum, Fig. 49, consists of two spermathecæ, E, which connect by two little tubes, H, H, with the oviduct near its mouth, and by two larger tubes, D, with the outside of the spider. The mouths of these larger [Pg 93] tubes are often surrounded by various hard appendages to support and guide the palpal organs when the latter are thrust into them. ”