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"The appearance," Professor Young writes, "which probably indicates a fact, is as if countless jets of heated gas were issuing through vents and spiracles over the whole surface, thus clothing it with flame which heaves and tosses like the blaze of a conflagration."
When the body-wall contracts the air is forced out of the thin-walled trachea through the spiracles; when the pressure is removed they are refilled by the fresh air rushing in. After a mosquito has been feeding on a man or some other animal it is often so distended that the blood shows rich and red through the thin sides of the walls of the abdomen.
One of them steers or paddles the canoe; while the other, being provided with two or three stakes and a mallet, leaps into the sea as soon as he sees a whale rise to the surface, gets upon its head, and immediately drives one of the stakes into one of the spiracles or blowing holes by which the whale breathes.
One larva on fourth stage was different from all others, and was described at the British Museum by Mr. W. F. Kirby as follows: "Larva reddish-brown, sparingly clothed with long slender white hairs, with four reddish stripes on the face, two rows of red spots on the back, spiracles surrounded with yellow, black and red rings; legs red, prolegs black, spotted with red.
On every side the seven gables pointed sharply towards the sky, and presented the aspect of a whole sisterhood of edifices, breathing through the spiracles of one great chimney.
Eye dullish yellow; pupil sea-green, glaring in some lights; teeth transverse, like a file; spiracles two, large, behind the eye, in the same cavity; belly white, terminating at the caudal fin. Very common in the sheltered bays, close in shore among the weeds. Not eaten by the Aborigines, who greatly abhor them, as they do also the sting-ray. Specimen two feet nine inches and a half long.
Lubbock found a simple system of tracheæ in Smynthurus which opens by "two spiracles in the head, opposite the insertion of the antennæ," i. e., on the back of the head.
In this family the body is long and slender, and the segments much alike in size. There is a pair of spiracles on each thoracic ring. The maxillæ are comb-shaped, due to the four slender, minutely ciliated spines placed within the outer tooth. The labium in Japyx is four-lobed and bears a small two-jointed palpus.
Other larvae in fourth stage, velvety black, with coral-red spines; others with black spines. 5th stage. Larvae, entirely black, with showy eye-like spiracles, polished black head; other larvae having the head brown and black. Larvae covered with long white hair; spines black or red. No difference noticed between the fifth and sixth stages.
If you stand on its summit and look at these two F-shaped spoutholes, you would take the whole head for an enormous bass-viol, and these spiracles, the apertures in its sounding-board.
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