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Updated: May 22, 2025
Sooner or later the hair-worm, or Gordius aquaticus as the naturalist terms it, leaves the body of the insect, and lays its eggs, fastened together in long strings, in water. From each egg a little creature armed with minute hooks is produced, and this young hair-worm burrows its way into the body of some insect, there to repeat the history of its parent.
The animal may or may not be captured; but the fact is duly chronicled in the local newspapers, and people wonder for a season over the phenomenon of a veritable Rip Van Winkle of a frog, which to all appearance, has lived for "thousands of years in the solid rock." Nor do the hair-worm and the frog stand alone in respect of their marvellous origin. Popular zoölogy is full of such marvels.
For this reason they are termed thread and hair lung-worms. The thread-worm is found in the trachea and the larger bronchial tubes, and the hair-worm in the most minute as well as the larger bronchioli. This disease is most common in wet seasons. Undrained pastures and ponds are said to favor the spread of the disease. Permanent pastures favor the reinfection of the flock from year to year.
Such is the well-ascertained history of the hair-worm, excluding entirely the popular belief in its origin. There certainly does exist in science a theory known as that of "spontaneous generation," which, in ancient times, accounted for the production of insects and other animals by assuming that they were produced in some mysterious fashion out of lifeless matter.
A poetic anatomist, in our own day, teaches that a snake, being a horizontal line, and man, being an erect line, constitute a right angle; and, between the lines of this mystical quadrant, all animate beings find their place; and he assumes the hair-worm, the span-worm, or the snake, as the type of prediction of the spine.
But not even the most ardent believer in the extreme modification of this theory which holds a place in modern scientific belief, would venture to maintain the production of a hair-worm by the mysterious vivification of an inert substance such as a horse's hair.
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