One of the minute crustaceans, the common Cyclops, is shown on [plate J], fig. 14. Its length is about the fourteenth of an inch; and though it is so small, the female Cyclops may easily be detected in the water by the curious egg-sacs.
CHAPTER V.
A SHORT ESSAY ON LEGS—TAKING A WALK—BRITISH FAKIRS—INSECT LIFE—DEVELOPMENT—THE TIGER MOTH—GROWTH OF THE CATERPILLAR—HOW TO DISSECT INSECTS—PLAN OF CATERPILLAR ANATOMY—SILK ORGANS—ORGANS OF RESPIRATION—SPIRACLES AND THEIR USE—WONDERS OF NATURE—THE CHRYSALIS—SCIENTIFIC LANGUAGE.
As, in common with many other animals, mankind are furnished with legs, and the power to move them, it is universally acknowledged that those limbs ought to be put to their proper use. But while men agree respecting the importance of the members alluded to, they differ greatly in the mode of employing them.
To the tailor, for example, legs are chiefly valuable as cushions, whereon to lay his cloth. For the jockey, the same members form a bifurcated or pronged apparatus, by the help of which he sticks on a horse. The legs of the acrobat are mostly employed to show the extent of ill-treatment to which the hip-joint can be subjected without suffering permanent dislocation. The dancer values his leg solely on account of the “light fantastic toe” which it carries at its extremity. The turner sees that two legs are absolutely necessary to mankind—i.e., one to stand upon, and the other to make a wheel run round. The surgeon views legs—on other people—as objects affording facilities for amputation. The boxer professionally regards his legs as “pins,” upon which the striking apparatus is kept off the ground. The soldier’s opinion of his legs is modified according to the temperament of the individual, and the position of the enemy. Some people employ their legs in continually mounting the same stairs, and never getting any higher; while others use those limbs in continually pacing the same path and never going any farther.
And of all these modes of employing the legs, the last, which is called “taking a walk,” is the dreariest and least excusable.
For, in the preceding cases, the owners of the legs gain their living, or at all events their life, by such employment of those members; and in the case of the interminable stairs, the individual is not acting by his own free will. But it does seem wonderful that a being possessed of intellectual powers should fancy himself to be the possessor of a right leg and a left one, merely that the right should mechanically pass the left so many thousand times daily and in its turn be passed by the left; while the sentient being above was occupied in exactly the same manner as if both legs were at rest, snugly tucked under a table.
Sad to relate, such is the general method of taking recreation.