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It stood stone still, and for the moment Tim could not decide which end of it was head and which was tail, or even whether it were not double-tailed and headless. Then, slowly, the apparition moved. Into that hard-packed earth it dug huge hooked claws, and from its tapering muzzle a wormlike tongue licked about, gathering the outrushing white ants into its gullet.

From one side of this projects a little wormlike tube, twisted and coiled upon itself, from three to six inches long and of about the size of a slate pencil. It is the shrunken and shriveled remains of a large pouch of the intestine which once opened into the cecum, and was used originally as a sort of second stomach for delaying and digesting the remains of the food.

But hardly had the words escaped, when, to the silent horror of all, two threads of greenish fire, like a forked tongue, darted out between the lips; and in a moment, the cadaverous face was crawled over by a swarm of wormlike flames.

Along the bottom, between the curious mounds, writhed a wormlike thing. But it was too huge to be described as truly wormlike it was eighteen or twenty feet long and a foot thick. It was blood red, almost blunt ended and patently without eyes. I took my gaze off it for an instant. When I looked again it had disappeared.

The Devagas apparently had had sense enough not to give the plasmoid every advantage. The Commissioner plunked a test shot next into one of the black protuberances. A small fiery crater appeared. It darkened quickly again. Out of the biggest opening, down near what would have been the foot of the stump if it had been a stump, something, long, red and wormlike wriggled rapidly.

It is one of the most instructive "living fossils" in the museum of nature. To understand its significance we must glance once more at an early chapter in the story of life. We saw that a vast and varied wormlike population must have filled the Archaean ocean, and that all the higher lines of animal development start from one or other point in this broad kingdom.

Myriads of disgusting clammy insects poured out of every opening of the skull, and a couple of shining, wormlike centipedes Geophiles, the scientists call them crawled about in the eye sockets.

This was that the so-called ova of Flustra had the power of independent movement by means of cilia, and were in fact larvae. In another short paper I showed that the little globular bodies which had been supposed to be the young state of Fucus loreus were the egg-cases of the wormlike Pontobdella muricata.

The Brazilians call the species the Tamandua bandeira, or the Banner Anteater, the term banner being applied in allusion to the curious colouration of the animal, each side of the body having a broad oblique stripe, half grey and half black, which gives it some resemblance to a heraldic banner. It has an excessively long slender muzzle, and a wormlike extensile tongue.

Evicted from its twofold sheath, the tertiary larva makes only very lazy movements of contraction and dilation, without being able to advance, without even being able to maintain its normal position, because of the weakness of its legs. It usually remains motionless, lying on its side, or else displays its drowsy activity merely by feeble, wormlike movements.