396 ANOPLURA, 



CASE in their whole bodies during their whole lives. It must be 

 XX. , 



remembered that, if this looks like a calumnious aspersion upon 



those whom he calls " poor people," it was written two hundred 

 years ago, and that Leewenhoek was a Dutchman. Let the 

 galled jade in Leyden wince. In London here our withers are 

 unwrung. He cannot mean to reflect on us. But to proceed. 

 He accordingly put on one leg, instead of a white understocking 

 that he usually wore, a fine black stocking, choosing that colour 

 in order that the eggs and young lice might be more easily seen. 

 Into this stocking he put two large female lice, and cutting another 

 black stocking into long strips, he bound it over the first, we 

 presume in two places, so as to keep his studs apart, as it were, 

 in two paddocks, to prevent their escaping. After wearing thit 

 stocking six days he took it off, and found that one of the lice 

 had laid fifty eggs and the other about forty, and in the body of 

 one that he opened he found at least fifty more, besides un- 

 doubtedly having in its body many more that his powers of vision 

 could not reach. Having tied them up again and worn the stock- 

 ing ten days longer, he found in it at least twenty-five lice of three 

 different sizes, and, not to make a long story of it, the conclusion 

 he arrived at was that two female lice might in eight weeks be 

 grandmothers, and see ten thousand of their own offspring — " and 

 who can tell whether in the heat of summer these creatures may 

 not breed in half the time." 



This cumulative increase will sufficiently explain the vast 

 numbers that we read of as occasionally swarming on those 

 persons of whom the louse has taken posession, as it were. But 

 it will not account for some of the cases where there has been no 

 sufficient time allowed them to estabHsh a colony by legitimate 

 process of succession — as, for example, the following case men- 

 tioned by Denny : — " The sudden appearance of these creatures 

 (says he) in vast numbers in places where they were not known 

 before, and upon individuals previously free from such com- 

 panions, is a circumstance not easy to account for. This, like 



