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But it is clear that, if the Scolia were to set to work as I did, there would be nothing left, after the first few bites, but an actual corpse, discharging fluids which would be fatal to it within twenty-four hours. The mother, it is true, in order to assure the immobility of her prey, has injected the poison of her sting into the nerve-centres.
In a word, sir and observe my sententious brevity their thermogenistic organization being adynamic, and their thermolysic functions being over-active owing to their thermic environment, and the thermotaxic balance being habitually anomalous, the emergency was not successfully encountered; and this was more particularly the case because the nerve-centres of vital resistance to sudden and extreme thermal abstraction were atrophied."
Her operation cannot be compared with mine in any respect. She practises the method of the skilful physiologist who induces anaesthesia; I go to work like the butcher who chops, cuts and disembowels. The sting leaves the nerve-centres intact.
Rifle fire can achieve either of these ends with little difficulty. Apart from these two nerve-centres, bombardment is not likely to effect the desired disablement, inasmuch as it cannot be rendered completely effective. The wings may be riddled like a sieve, but the equilibrium of the machine is not seriously imperilled thereby.
In the sting which they give to the nerve-centres of their victim, in order to destroy its power of moving without killing it, these different species of hymenoptera take into account, so to speak, the different species of prey they respectively attack.
Similar results have been obtained from experiments on cats. These facts with many others tend to show that the power of maintaining a constant temperature has been a gradual development, as Darwin's theory of evolution suggests, and that anything that interferes with the due working of the higher nerve-centres puts the animal back again, for the time being, on to a lower plane of evolution.
When, however, the attention was excited by my second address, it perceived the first faint impulse which had been registered upon the protoplasm of the nerve-centres, although unfelt. Probably most of my readers have had a similar experience.
The exploits of a host of Wasps whose flesh-eating grubs are provided with meat that is motionless though not dead have taught us the skilful art of the paralyzing insect, which numbs the locomotory nerve-centres with its venom. We have now a humble little animal that first produces complete anæsthesia in its patient.
The shock has acted like a battery upon the nerve-centres. Instead of a broken neck, I have a cured leg. I'm a lucky fellow."
It is possible that the two sides of the brain, which are accustomed in health to work as one organ, are disjoined by the poison, so that one half of the brain thinks and acts in opposition to the other half. From what has already been said it is plain that memory is entirely distinct from consciousness, and that it is in a certain sense automatic, or at least an attribute of all nerve-centres.
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