(Shelley, England in 1819.)
The extension of war into the Near and Far East has brought into action two genera of leeches which were and still are the cause of extreme inconvenience and even of real danger to troops operating in these areas. The enemies of our Allies will still insist on fighting on richly stocked leech-grounds. For in the new war area, in southern Europe, Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and parts of India and the real East, two genera of leeches—which are indeed not the friend but the enemy of man, especially of the soldier—abound.
The first of these two is Limnatis nilotica (Sav.), and it is from Savigny that I have stolen the picture of this species.
Fig. 58.—I. Limnatis nilotica, side view. II. Oral sucker, showing the characteristic median dorsal slit and the three teeth; III. ventral view. (From Savigny.)
It is a leech of considerable size, attaining a length of 8 cm. to 10 cm., and its outline rather slopes inward at the anterior end. The dorsal surface is brownish-green with six longitudinal stripes, and the ventral surface is dark. It is a fresh-water leech, and it occurs from the Atlantic Islands, the Azores, and the Canaries—its western limit—all along the northern edge of Africa until it reaches Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Armenia, and Turkestan, where it achieves its uttermost eastern boundary. This leech lives in stagnant water; especially does it congregate in drinking-wells—the wells so often mentioned in the New Testament. In the Talmud (Abōdāh Zārāh, 17b) an especial warning is given against drinking water from the rivers or wells or pools for fear of swallowing leeches. Doubtless the New Testament Jew knew in his day almost as much as we know now about these leeches. They were the cause of endless trouble to Napoleon’s soldiers in his Egyptian campaign, and are still a real pest in the Near East.
I cannot recall that Napoleon talked much about spreading ‘Kultur,’[18] but he certainly did it. He took with his army into Egypt a score of the ablest men of science he could gather together in France. He established in Cairo an ‘Institut’ modelled on that of Paris; and his scientific ‘corps’ produced a series of monographs on Egyptian antiquities and on the natural history of Egypt that has not yet been equalled by any other invading force. Napoleon freed the serfs in Germany, he codified the laws of France, and these laws were adopted by large parts of Europe; he extended the use of the decimal system. Napoleon had a constructive policy, and was never a consistent apostle of wanton destruction. If he destroyed it was to build up again, and in many instances he ‘builded better than he knew.’ He seldom so mistook his enemies as to destroy, to terrify; the ‘frightfulness,’ though bad enough in his times, had limits. Napoleon had at least in him the elements of a sane and common-sense psychology. He knew that what was ‘frightful’ to the French was not necessarily ‘frightful’ to the Russian.
Fig. 59.—Anterior sucker of Hirudo medicinalis. This is to compare with the anterior sucker of Limnatis nilotica, which has a characteristic dorsal median slit. See preceding figure. (From Savigny.)
Amongst the wonderful series of books and monographs on Egypt which described the varying activities of the savants he took in his train, and who, at the confines of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries invaded the country of the Pharaohs, none is more remarkable than Savigny’s monograph on the ‘Natural History’ of that country. And in this folio the leech (Limnatis nilotica) was for the first time fully described and depicted.