9° Mosquitoes 



It is really very beautiful, too, but it is doubtful if it 

 is one of the things whose beauty will ever be ap- 

 preciated. When your teeth are chattering, and all 

 your bones are filled with a thousand aches, and your 

 head feels like an over-ripe pumpkin in the sun, it is 

 small comfort to meditate on the marvellous trans- 

 formations going on within your blood. You aren't 

 grateful for being selected as the vehicle for such 

 miracles of nature — not a bit. 



The best place at which to start in following the 

 life of the parasite is at the "amebula" or " Plas- 

 modium " stage (Fig. 19, page 92). At this period 

 the animal is a single cell, a shapeless, jelly-like 

 lump appearing as a spot inside a red blood corpuscle, 

 where it moves, or rather flows about, with the 

 streaming motion of an ameba, feeding on the 

 corpuscle and destroying its red colouring matter 

 (hemoglobin), until the corpuscle is all eaten up 

 except its wall. When this has come to pass, the 

 parasite, having literally eaten itself out of house 

 and home, finds it high time to be moving. It has 

 devoured all there is to devour. The next stage is 

 a non-sexual reproduction. First, the nucleus of the 

 cell splits into several daughter nuclei. (A nucleus 

 is a sort of lump of specialised, dense protoplasm 

 within the cell protoplasm, or jelly, and on it evi- 

 dently depends the life of the cell.) Each of the 

 daughter nuclei proceeds to take its equal share of 

 the property — that is to say, the protoplasm of the 

 mother cell. This done, they burst out through the 

 membrane of the used-up corpuscle and go house- 

 hunting, each locating in a new corpuscle. There is 



