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Updated: June 5, 2025
In this cup is inserted the end of the abdomen of the larva, which, before allowing itself to fall to earth, takes a sun-bath, grows harder, stretches itself, and tries its strength, lightly swinging at the end of its life-line. This little flea, as Réaumur calls it, first white, then amber-coloured, is precisely the larva which will delve in the earth.
There is not a single tree, there is no grass ... dreary as hell.... Baku and the Caspian Sea are such rotten places that I would not agree to live there for a million. There are no roofs, there are no trees either; Persian faces everywhere, fifty degrees Reaumur of heat, a smell of kerosine, the naphtha-soaked mud squelches under one's feet, the drinking water is salt.
Although Tahaiti is only seventeen degrees from the Equator, the heat is so much moderated by refreshing breezes that it is very supportable even to an European. Bougainville never found it above twenty-two, and often under eighteen degrees of Reaumur. That indeed was during the winter; but even in January, the middle of the Tahaitian summer, the atmosphere is much cooled by the frequent rains.
I do not intend to adorn the truth, or merit the just reproach Reaumur addressed to his predecessors in the study of our honey-flies, whom he accused of substituting for the marvellous reality marvels that were imaginary and merely plausible. The fact that the hive contains so much that is wonderful does not warrant our seeking to add to its wonders.
Bernard de Jussieu and Guettard followed them up by like inquiries upon the marine sea-anemones and corallines; Reaumur, convinced against his will of the entire justice of Peyssonel's views, adopted them, and made him a half-and-half apology in the preface to the next published volume of the "Memoires pour servir l'Histoire des Insectes;" and, from this time forth, Peyssonel's doctrine that corals are the work of animal organisms has been part of the body of established scientific truth.
Although we were travelling on snow, the temperature was so mild that not one of our party put on a cloak. We could not imagine how it was possible for snow to exist in such a high temperature. The thermometer stood at 9 degrees Reaumur. A fatiguing and dangerous ride of five hours at length brought us from the foot to the highest point of Mount Lebanon.
Conspicuous amidst these nocturnal moths is the richly-coloured Acherontia Satanas, one of the Singhalese representatives of our Death's-head moth, which utters a sharp and stridulous cry when seized. This sound has been conjectured to be produced by the friction of its thorax against the abdomen; Reaumur believed it to be caused by the rubbing of the palpi against the tongue.
Fatty matters seem to have the power of protecting from cold, or at least of greatly diminishing its action. The Laplander and the Samoiede anoint their skin with rancid fish oil, and thus expose themselves in the mountains to a temperature of -36 deg. Reaumur, or 50 deg. below zero Fahrenheit.
Reaumur transferred this name to the newcomers, and called them fresh-water polyps, to the infinite amusement of Voltaire, who had declared that they were only blades of grass; a new proof, among many others, that in natural history all the intellect in the world is not worth a pair of good eyes.
We went up to the sixth floor of a house in the Rue Reaumur, and on a plain-looking door read the words Massin, manufacturer of make-up boxes, I knocked, and a little hunchback girl opened the door. I recognised Leontine's sister, as she had come several times to the Conservatoire. "Oh," she exclaimed, "what a surprise for us! Titine," she then called out, "here is Mademoiselle Sarah!"
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