United States or Wallis and Futuna ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I am not aware that any observations have been made with reference to the presence or absence of Culex fasciatus in high altitudes, but the inference that it is not to be found in such localities as the City of Mexico seems justified by the established facts already referred to.
Vergil himself furnishes the clue for this interpretation of the Culex, but it has been overlooked because of the wretched condition of the text that we have. The first lines of the poem seem to mean: "My verses on the Culex shall be filled with erudition so that all the lore of the past may be strung together playfully in the form of a story."
The Culex has been one of the standing puzzles of literary criticism, and would be interesting, if only to illustrate the inadequacy of stylistic criteria.
Lazear was stricken, and died in convulsions just one week later, after several days of delirium with black vomit. Such is yellow fever. "He was bitten by a stray mosquito while applying the other insects to a patient in one of the city hospitals. He did not recognize it as a Stegomyia, and thought it was a Culex.
A peculiar, and to us offensive, exhibition of learning consists in those tirades on common-place themes, embodying all the stock current of instances, of which the earliest example is found in the catalogue of the dead in Virgil's Culex.
Finally, most consoling of all, it was discovered that, while the ordinary Culex mosquito can breed, going through all the stages from the egg to the complete insect, in about fourteen days, so that any puddle which will remain wet for that length of time, or even such exceedingly temporary collections of water as the rain caught in a tomato-can, in an old rubber boot, in broken crockery, etc., will serve her for a breeding-place, the Anopheles on the other hand takes nearly three months for the completion of her development.
The hardest argument to meet is that drawn from the extraordinary imperfection of the plot, which mars the whole consistency of the poem; but even this is not incompatible with Virgil's authorship. For all ancient testimony agrees in regarding the Culex of Virgil as a poem of little merit.
The designation does not fit the Culex, which is the only poem besides the Aetna that could be in question. It is best, therefore, to take the Aetna into account in studying Vergil's life, even though we reserve a place in our memories for that stray phrase de qua ambigitur.
The Georgics, however, are not written in the spirit of a colonial advertisement. In the youthful Culex Vergil had dwelt somewhat too emphatically upon the song-birds and the cool shade, and had drawn upon himself the genial comment of Horace that Alfius did not find conditions in the country quite as enchanting as pictured. This time the poet paints no idealized landscape.
What success may attend their efforts remains to be seen, but at all events the fundamental facts have been demonstrated that this germ is present in the blood and that the disease is transmitted by a certain species of mosquito Culex fasciatus.
Word Of The Day