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When placed on burning charcoal, this double-bellied gourd turns black, becomes covered with shiny warts that look like jet beads, emits a smell like that of grilled meat and leaves a residue of red clay. It is therefore formed of clay and sanies. Moreover, the paste is sprinkled with little scraps of dead flesh.
The grubs of the bumblebee fly roam about the test-tube without touching the live tidbit. The most that they do is to put their mouths for a moment to the morsel; then they take it away again, not caring for the dish. They want something different: a wounded, a dying grub; a corpse dissolving into sanies.
Does the insect collect resin impaired by the weather, soiled by the sanies of rotten wood? When kneading it, does it mix some dark ingredient with it? I look upon this as possible, but not as proved, since I have never seen the Bee collecting her resin.
Phanæus Milon scoffs at difficulties. He does much more than that: he laughs at our classifications. The word Dung-beetle implies a lover of dung. He sets no value on it, either for his own use or for that of his offspring. What he wants is the sanies of corpses. He is to be found under the carcasses of birds, Dogs or Cats, in the company of the undertakers-in-ordinary.
This paste, when placed on hot charcoal, sifted under the lens and deprived of its particles of dead bodies, becomes much darker, is covered with shiny bubbles and sends forth puffs of that acrid smoke by which we so readily recognize burnt animal matter. The whole mass of the kernel, therefore, is strongly impregnated with sanies.
Underneath, in a pool of sanies, is a surging mass of swarming sterns and pointed heads, which emerge, wriggle and dive in again. It suggests a seething billow. It turns one's stomach. It is horrible, most horrible. Let us steel ourselves against the sight: it will be worse elsewhere. Here is a fat snake. Rolled into a compact whorl, she fills the whole pan. The greenbottles are plentiful.
On the other hand, do not use the wire gauze cover, let the flies do their work unimpeded; and things forthwith assume another aspect. In three or four days, an oozing sanies appears under the animal and soaks the sand to some distance. I shall never forget the striking spectacle with which I conclude this chapter.
There was something lacking; it made clumsy returns to Ciceronian magniloquence, but had not yet acquired that special flavor which in the fourth century, and particularly during the centuries following, the odor of Christianity would give the pagan tongue, decomposed like old venison, crumbling at the same time that the old world civilization collapsed, and the Empires, putrefied by the sanies of the centuries, succumbed to the thrusts of the barbarians.
As soon as I had done I went outside, and getting some of the many surrounding ladies to hold bush-lights, I examined the case. The whole hand was a mass of yellow pus, streaked with sanies, large ulcers were burrowing into the fore-arm, while in the arm-pit was a big abscess.
An egg laying mother, therefore, appears, inspects the surface of the pool of sanies swarming with grubs, selects the one that suits her and perches on it; then, with the tip of her pointed abdomen, whence emerges, for an instant, a short probe kept hidden until then, she operates on the patient, perforating his paunch with a dexterous wound into which the germs are inserted.