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Updated: May 3, 2025
Also many different sorts of medusa, particularly tubes of about 0.5 inches in length, with an apparatus shaped like a proboscis at one extremity of it. These I have not attempted to describe. In general the animals we caught this day differed altogether from those we had hitherto found during this voyage. Some few were the same, but the great majority were new.
I have reason to believe, although the fact has not been authoritatively stated by naturalists, that the stomach of the elephant will be found to include a section analogous to that possessed by some of the ruminants, calculated to contain a supply of water as a provision against emergencies. The fact of his being enabled to retain a quantity of water and discharge it at pleasure has been long known to every observer of the habits of the animal; but the proboscis has always been supposed to be "his water-reservoir," and the theory of an internal receptacle has not been discussed. The truth is that the anatomy of the elephant is even yet but imperfectly understood , and, although some peculiarities of his stomach were observed at an early period, and even their configuration described, the function of the abnormal portion remained undetermined, and has been only recently conjectured. An elephant which belonged to Louis XIV. died at Versailles in 1681 at the age of seventeen, and an account of its dissection was published in the Mémoires pour servir
It has been suggested that the mosquitoes dying and disintegrating on the surface of water may liberate the filariæ which may later find their way into the system of the vertebrate host when the water is used for drinking, but most of the investigations made so far seem to indicate that they make their way directly from the proboscis into the new host.
The Bluebottles are not long in inspecting what I have prepared for them: they enter the jar, go out and come back again, inquiring into the invisible thing revealed by its fragrance. A diligent watch enables me to see them fussing about, exploring the sandy expanse, tapping it with their feet, sounding it with their proboscis. I leave the visitors undisturbed for a fortnight or three weeks.
That of warning to the herd is a deep hollow ringing sound, like that of an empty cask being struck; a common caution to their friends is a simple quiver of the lips, which makes a noise like prur-r-r; that of pain is a deep groan from the throat; that of rage is a shrill trumpeting through his proboscis. But they also make many other scarcely describable noises.
He screamed in anguish, with his proboscis raised high in the air, then falling on his side he laid his head to the ground, first his cheek and then his brow, and pressed down his doubled-in trunk as though he would force it into the earth; then suddenly rising he balanced himself on his forehead and forelegs, holding his hind-feet fairly off the ground.
The poison-germ, contained in a bulb at the root of the proboscis, seems capable, although very minute in quantity, of reproducing itself, for the blood after death by tsetse is very small in quantity, and scarcely stains the hands in dissection. I shall have by-and-by to mention another insect, which by the same operation produces in the human subject both vomiting and purging.
All the muscles are flabby, and the heart often so soft that the fingers may be made to meet through it. The lungs and liver partake of the disease. The stomach and bowels are pale and empty, and the gall-bladder is distended with bile. These symptoms seem to indicate what is probably the case, a poison in the blood, the germ of which enters when the proboscis is inserted to draw blood.
Not for nothing their long practice in sharpening pins and needles! It had come into play here. Richard had turned the crank and Robin had held down each official proboscis, and the board had winced. Then Richard and Robin had changed places, and the board had groaned. Now Richard and Robin were changing back, and soon the board might scream. "I'll take a hand too," said O'Grady.
They, and their courts, and their armies are, if one could see clearly, only a large species of marsh mosquito, with bayonet proboscis and melodious, band-mastered trumpeting, in the summer air; the twilight being, perhaps, sometimes fairer, but hardly more wholesome, for its glittering mists of midge companies.
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