第66章

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 connected with the tunic, for just as the shell is with the body of the snail so is the whole superstructure with our grub; and they do not drop off, but can only be torn off, as though they were all of a piece with him, and the removal of the tunic is as fatal to this grub as the removal of the shell would be to the snail. In course of time this grub becomes a chrysalis, as is the case with the silkworm, and lives in a motionless condition. But as yet it is not known into what winged condition it is transformed.

The fruit of the wild fig contains the psen, or fig-wasp. This creature is a grub at first; but in due time the husk peels off and the psen leaves the husk behind it and flies away, and enters into the fruit of the fig-tree through its orifice, and causes the fruit not to drop off; and with a view to this phenomenon, country folk are in the habit of tying wild figs on to fig-trees, and of planting wild fig-trees near domesticated ones.

In the case of animals that are quadrupeds and red-blooded and oviparous, generation takes place in the spring, but copulation does not take place in an uniform season. In some cases it takes place in the spring, in others in summer time, and in others in the autumn, according as the subsequent season may be favourable for the young.

The tortoise lays eggs with a hard shell and of two colours within, like birds' eggs, and after laying them buries them in the ground and treads the ground hard over them; it then broods over the eggs on the surface of the ground, and hatches the eggs the next year.

The hemys, or fresh-water tortoise, leaves the water and lays its eggs. It digs a hole of a casklike shape, and deposits therein the eggs; after rather less than thirty days it digs the eggs up again and hatches them with great rapidity, and leads its young at once off to the water. The sea-turtle lays on the ground eggs just like the eggs of domesticated birds, buries the eggs in the ground, and broods over them in the night-time. It lays a very great number of eggs, amounting at times to one hundred.

Lizards and crocodiles, terrestrial and fluvial, lay eggs on land.

The eggs of lizards hatch spontaneously on land, for the lizard does not live on into the next year; in fact, the life of the animal is said not to exceed six months. The river-crocodile lays a number of eggs, sixty at the most, white in colour, and broods over them for sixty days: for, by the way, the creature is very long-lived. And the disproportion is more marked in this animal than in any other between the smallness of the original egg and the huge size of the full-grown animal. For the egg is not larger than that of the goose, and the young crocodile is small, answering to the egg in size, but the full-grown animal attains the length of twenty-six feet; in fact, it is actually stated that the animal goes on growing to the end of its days.

With regard to serpents or snakes, the viper is externally viviparous, having been previously oviparous internally. The egg, as with the egg of fishes, is uniform in colour and soft-skinned. The young serpent grows on the surface of the egg, and, like the young of fishes, has no shell-like envelopment. The young of the viper is born inside a membrane that bursts from off the young creature in three days; and at times the young viper eats its way out from the inside of the egg. The mother viper brings forth all its young in one day, twenty in number, and one at a time. The other serpents are externally oviparous, and their eggs are strung on to one another like a lady's necklace; after the dam has laid her eggs in the ground she broods over them, and hatches the eggs in the following year.