86 GENERATION OF INSECTS 
abdomen, these are always females, and are large-bellied 
in proportion to the number of eggs they carry. The 
males, as well as the females, cast their skin whole, like 
snakes, spiders, and other insects, the skin being nothing 
more than a fine white tunic shaped like the body. When 
these little animals were brought to me I was so fortu- 
nate as to have with me Signor Nicholas Steno, of Den- 
mark, a famous anatomist, as you know, and a man of 
gracious and amiable manners, who is being royally en- 
tertained at this Court by His Highness, the Grand Duke. 
It occurred to both of us to examine the entrails and the 
internal structure of these little creatures as far as their 
minuteness would allow. We saw that a canal, starting 
from the mouth and extending through the body to an 
aperture near the last joint of the tail, performs the 
functions of the oesophagus, stomach, and intestine; and 
around this little canal we found a confused mass of 
many and divers filaments that are, perhaps, veins and 
arteries. From the middle of the body to the end of 
the tail we saw a large number of eggs, bound together 
and enclosed in a sac hardly discernible on account of its 
thinness. These eggs were not larger than millet grains, 
and some were soft and tender; others were hard. The 
soft ones seemed yellowish and almost transparent; but 
the hard ones, though yellow inside, had a black shell; 
and taking them all together, black and yellow, in a 
single animal we counted up to seventy. While we were 
thus engaged we observed that notwithstanding the fact 
that we had torn the entrails out of some of these ani- 
mals, they continued to live and to move in the same way 
as do disembowelled reptiles. Whereupon we cut off the 
heads of others, and the head lived for a short time with- 
out the body; but the headless body was extremely lively 
