Are the hunch-backed mothers all the immediate daughters of the black Louse, the founder of the gall, or do they form a lineage at various removes? The latter seems probable in the horn-shaped galls, where the mothers are so exceedingly numerous. A single origin would not account for this prodigality. As for the other, far less thickly-populated galls, it seems to me that a single generation of red Lice would be sufficient.
Let me mention a few approximate figures. In the first week of September I open a horn-shaped gall, selected from among the largest. It measures eight inches in length by nearly an inch and a half in thickness at its greatest diameter. The population consists mainly of orange Lice, plump, smooth, and endowed with wing-stumps. These are the progeny of the tiny mothers. These latter are scarlet, stocky [[270]]and wrinkled, with their fore-part tapering and their hinder-part as if it were cut off short, so that their shape is almost triangular. As far as I can judge in the confusion of such a multitude, they should number some hundreds.
To estimate the whole population, I pack it into a glass tube eighteen millimetres[4] in diameter. The column thus formed occupies a height of 56 millimetres.[5] The volume, therefore, amounts to 16,532 cubic millimetres.[6] Therefore, allowing one Louse, roughly, to each cubic millimetre, the population of the gall is about sixteen thousand. As I cannot count, I gauge. Even so did Herschel[7] gauge the Milky Way. For numerical infinity, the Louse vies with the star. In four months the black atom, the first pioneer of the gall, has left all these descendants; and the end is not yet. [[271]]
[1] 1⁄25 inch.—Translator’s Note. [↑]
[2] A little more than ¾ inch.—B.M. [↑]
[3] The Abbé Charles François Lhomond (1727–1794), a famous French grammarian and classicist.—Translator’s Note. [↑]
[4] Not quite ¾ inch.—Translator’s Note. [↑]