It will be observed that, probably without their knowing anything at all about it, General Joffre, General von Kluck, Field-Marshal French, the Grand Duke Nicholas, General von Hindenburg are fighting on some of the best leech-areas in Europe—a point to which we shall return when dealing with the leeches of the Orient.
One wonders what the leeches think of it all!
CHAPTER XI
LEECHES
Part II
THE MEDICINAL LEECH (Hirudo medicinalis)—continued
Non missura cutem, nisi plena cruoris, hirudo.
(Horace.)
There is no doubt that the medicinal leech is one of the most beautiful of animals. Many of its cousins are uniform and dull in colour—‘self-coloured,’ as the drapers would call them; but the coloration of the medicinal leech could not be improved upon. It is a delicious harmony of reddish-browns and greens and blacks and yellows, a beautiful soft symphony of velvety orange and green and black, the markings being repeated on each segment, but not to the extent of a tedious repetition. So beautiful are they that the fastidious ladies who adorned the salons at the height of the leech mania, during the beginning of the eighteenth century, used to deck their dresses with embroidered leeches, and by repeating the design one after the other constructed a chain of leeches which, as a ribbon, was inserted around the confines of their vesture.
Harding tells us that the dorsal surface of H. medicinalis is ‘usually of a green, richly variegated colour, with orange and black spots, exhibiting an extremely variable pattern, based generally upon three pairs of reddish-brown or yellowish, more of less, longitudinal stripes, often interrupted by black or sessile spots occurring on the rim of each somite. The ventral surface is more or less green, more or less spotted with black, with a pair of black marginal stripes.’