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Now, if you want to be a monk, if you are willing, like Origen, to purchase with your entire manhood some supposed facility of spiritual contemplation and depth of insight into the Infinite, or if you intend to become a Brahmin, and seek in your navel the dyspeptic divinity who there wields his sceptre, while your despised body is given up to the predatory ravages of genus pediculus, well and good.
Even now the Homoeopathists have been introducing the venom of serpents, under the learned title of Lachesis, and outraging human nature with infusions of the pediculus capitis; that is, of course, as we understand their dilutions, the names of these things; for if a fine-tooth-comb insect were drowned in Lake Superior, we cannot agree with them in thinking that every drop of its waters would be impregnated with all the pedicular virtues they so highly value.
I think by that time you will not find it necessary to ask any more questions." Si went back to his cooking, with the Pediculus still on his arm. He wanted to show it to Shorty. The Captain's profound explanation, with its large words, was a little too much for Si.
Noah Webster, LL.D., knew him. Noah is good authority. He derives his name from the Gothic verb liusan, to devour. The noble Roman knew him. He called him pediculus. He is truly democratic in his instincts and disposition. He loves a rebel. But a copperhead loves a fat army contract. So does he. On this line he is cosmopolitan. He has some splendid business qualifications.
And wherever he travels a band of music goes with him, for this hum which wanders by us is doubtless to him a vast and inspiring strain of melody. I thought all this, while the Scarabee supposed I was studying the minute characters of the enigmatical specimen. I know what I consider your pediculus melittae, I said at length. Do you think it really the larva of meloe?
And our friends in gray had left some things in these old camps which ere long we all fervently wished they had taken with them, namely, a most plentiful quantity of the insect known as "Pediculus vestimenti," which forthwith assailed us as voraciously as if they had been on quarter rations, or less, ever since the beginning of the war.
"I was going on to tell you," continued the Captain, "that there are several kinds of Pediculi we don't say Pediculuses. There is the Pediculus Capitis Latin again but it means the kind that lives on the head. I presume when you were a little shaver your mother now and then harrowed your head with a fine-tooth comb?"
"I do not think the Pediculus Corporis confines himself exclusively to Corporals, as his name might indicate," said the Captain, laughing at Si's literal translation and his personal application of the word. "He no doubt likes a juicy and succulent Corporal, but I don't believe he is any respecter of persons. That's my opinion, from what I've heard about him.
I wish to settle the point once for all whether the Pediculus Mellitae is or is not the larva of Meloe. Here is a fellow-creature of mine and yours who is asked to see all the glories of the firmament brought close to him, and he is too busy with a little unmentionable parasite that infests the bristly surface of a bee to spare an hour or two of a single evening for the splendors of the universe!
The remaining parasites belong to the skin-biting lice, or Mallophaga, and I will speak of the several genera referred to in their natural order, beginning with the highest form and that which is nearest allied to Pediculus.
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