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This is the source of one kind of the dark-coloured muscæ volitantes. If this dark spot lies above the center of the eye, we turn our eyes that way, expecting to bring it into the center of the eye, that we may view it more distinctly; and in this case the dark spectrum seems to move upwards.
When a fist, applied to the eye, makes us 'see stars'; when a liver not in good working order makes us see muscae volitantes, or 'spiders'; when alcohol produces 'the horrors, visions of threatening persons or animals, when a lesion of the brain, or delirium, or a disease of the organs of sense causes visions, or when they occur to starved and enthusiastic ascetics, all these false perceptions are just as much 'apparitions, as the view of a friend at a distance, beheld at the moment of his death, or as the unrecognised spectre seen in a haunted house.
"Spes hominum caecos, morbos, votumque, labores, Et passim toto volitantes aethere curas."
A man will say that a smell is in his nose, a taste in his mouth, a singing in his ears, a creeping or a warmth in his skin; but if he is jaundiced, he does not say that he has yellow in his eyes, but that everything looks yellow; and if he is troubled with muscae volitantes, he says, not that he has specks in his eyes, but that he sees specks dancing before his eyes.
But as the nerves of very weak people lose their sensibility, in the same manner as their muscles lose their activity, by a small time of exertion, it frequently happens, that sick people in the extreme debility of fevers are perpetually employed in picking something from the bed-clothes, occasioned by their mistaking the appearance of these muscæ volitantes in their eyes.
Can your skipper come aboard? 'Just launching a boat, cried Logan. Bude gave the necessary orders. His captain stepped up to him and saluted. 'Do you know what these red fire-flies were that come aboard, sir? he asked. 'Fire-flies? Oh, musae volitantes sonorae, a common phenomenon in these latitudes, answered Bude. Logan rejoiced to see that the earl was himself again.
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