Page - 1091 - in The Complete Aristotle

peculiar to the animal, the Cynoroestes. In all animals that are subject to lice, the latter originate from the animals themselves. Moreover, in animals that bathe at all, lice are more than usually abundant when they change the water in which they bathe. In the sea, lice are found on fishes, but they are generated not out of the fish but out of slime; and they resemble multipedal wood-lice, only that their tail is flat. Sea-lice are uniform in shape and universal in locality, and are particularly numerous on the body of the red mullet. And all these insects are multipedal and devoid of blood. The parasite that feeds on the tunny is found in the region of the fins; it resembles a scorpion, and is about the size of a spider. In the seas between Cyrene and Egypt there is a fish that attends on the dolphin, which is called the ‘dolphin’s louse’. This fish gets exceedingly fat from enjoying an abundance of food while the dolphin is out in pursuit of its prey. < div id=“section99” class=“section” title=“32”> 32 Other animalcules besides these are generated, as we have already remarked, some in wool or in articles made of wool, as the ses or clothes- moth. And these animalcules come in greater numbers if the woollen substances are dusty; and they come in especially large numbers if a spider be shut up in the cloth or wool, for the creature drinks up any moisture that may be there, and dries up the woollen substance. This grub is found also in men’s clothes. A creature is also found in wax long laid by, just as in wood, and it is the smallest of animalcules and is white in colour, and is designated the acari or mite. In books also other animalcules are found, some resembling the grubs found in garments, and some resembling tailless scorpions, but very small. As a general rule we may state that such animalcules are found in practically anything, both in dry things that are becoming moist and in moist things that are drying, provided they contain the conditions of life. There is a grub entitled the ‘faggot-bearer’, as strange a creature as is known. Its head projects outside its shell, mottled in colour, and its feet are near the end or apex, as is the case with grubs in general; but the rest of its body is cased in a tunic as it were of spider’s web, and there are little dry twigs about it, that look as though they had stuck by accident to the creature as it went walking about. But these twig-like formations are naturally 1091