Chapter 31 fourth quarter

"Aha, do you like this, Lowell?" Agassiz entered, holding a stuffed insect in his palm.His palms were fleshy and often smelled of petroleum, fish and alcohol, which were difficult to wash off.Lovell forgot that he was standing next to a stuffed skeleton that looked like a distorted hen. Agassi said proudly: "When I was traveling in Mauritius, the consul gave me two dodo skeletons! Isn't it a treasure?" "Does it taste delicious to you, Agassiz?" Holmes asked. "Of course. What a pity we don't have a dodo in our Saturday Club! Tasting good food has always been one of the greatest pleasures of man's palate. What a pity. Well, shall we begin?"

Lowell and Holmes followed him to a table and sat down.Agassiz carefully removed the insect from a vial of alcohol. "First, please tell me, Dr. Holmes, where did you find these peculiar little creatures?" "Lowell actually found it," Holmes answered cautiously, "near Beacon Hill." "Beacon Hill," Agassiz repeated, speaking with a thick Swiss-German accent, the word was completely out of tune. "Tell me, Dr. Holmes, what do you think of them?" Holmes himself doesn't like asking questions that lead to wrong answers. "That's not my specialty. They're blowflies, aren't they, Agassiz?"

"Oh! Yes. Which category?" Agassiz asked. "Spirals," Holmes said. "kind?" "Maggot flies." "Aha!" Agassiz laughed. "If you listen to the books, they are, Holmes dear." "So they're not... maggot flies?" Lovell asked.His face was pale, without a trace of blood.If Holmes was wrong, the flies were noxious. "The body structure of these two kinds of flies is almost exactly the same," Agassiz said, and then he took a breath to hide his other reactions, "almost." Agassiz got up and walked to the bookshelf.Tall and imposing, he looked more like a contented politician than a biologist and botanist.The newly built Museum of Comparative Zoology is the culmination of his career, because he finally has the resources to complete his classification of countless unknown plants and animals around the world. "I'll show you something. We have about 2,500 known species of flies in North America. But I estimate that 10,000 species live among us today."

He spread out several patterns.The drawing is rough, more like a grotesque human face, the nose is scribbled into two strange black holes. Agassiz explained: "A few years ago, Cockerel, a surgeon of the French Imperial Navy, was ordered to come to the colony on Devil's Island in French Guiana. This colony is in South America, just north of Brazil. There are five The colonists were suffering from a severe and undiagnosed disease. Not long after Dr. Cockrell's arrival, one of the patients died. When the dead man's sinuses were flushed with water, he found three hundred blowfly larvae in them."

Holmes was puzzled, "These maggots are living in a person—a living person?" "Don't interrupt, Holmes!" cried Lowell. Agassi's face was serious and he said nothing, in order to express his affirmation to Holmes' question. "But the screwworm can only live in decaying matter," Holmes objected. "No maggot can do that." "Remember the eight thousand undetectable species of flies I was talking about, Holmes!" Agassiz retorted. "These are not screwworms. They're just another species, my friend, one we've never seen before." A species we've seen, or one we don't like to believe exists. The female fly of this species can lay eggs in the nostrils of patients, where the eggs hatch into larvae, which grow into maggots and eat all the way to The patient's brain. More than two people have died from the same infectious disease on Devil's Island. The doctor has only one way to treat the other patients, and cut off the maggots in their nostrils. The screw maggots can only parasitize the corruption of matter—they prefer dead bodies best. But the larvae of this species of fly, Holmes, survive only among living things."

Agassi paused to see the reaction on their faces.Then he went on. "The female fly mates every three days, but she lays so many eggs that she lays ten to eleven times that number in a lifespan of a month or so. A female fly can lay eggs at a time. As many as four hundred. They find warm wounds on animals or people and hide in them. The eggs hatch into maggots and then burrow into the wound and penetrate the entire body. The more serious the infection of the flesh with maggots, it will attract other adult flies The maggots feed on living flesh, and after a few days they turn into flies. My friend Cockrell calls these flies the American cone fly."

"Cone... fly," Lowell muttered.He looked at Holmes and said hoarsely, "The cannibal." "Exactly," Agassiz said, with the reluctant enthusiasm of a scientist announcing a terrible discovery, "Cockrell reported it to a scientific journal, but very few people believed him." "And you?" Holmes asked. "Without a doubt," said Agassi, very resolutely, "I have studied the history of medicine and the records of nearly thirty years since Cockerell sent me these drawings, and some of them have spoken of similar experiences, but they say Isidore St.-Hilaire recorded a case of larvae found under the skin of an infant. According to Kobold, Dr. Livingstone found several larvae on the shoulder of a wounded Negro. Pteroptera larvae. I found in my travels in Brazil that the Brazilians call these flies virga, and consider them to be pests that injure man and animals. And during the Mexican War, it is recorded that what people called the 'meat fly' would appear in Lay eggs on the wounds of soldiers abandoned on the battlefield. Sometimes maggots do no harm and feed only on putrefaction. These are common flies, common maggot flies, such as the one you're familiar with, Holmes Doctor. But at other times, soldiers' wounds swell up for no apparent reason, and by this time the soldier is almost dead, beyond salvation. They're gutted out of their bodies. Do you understand? These are cone flies. These flies Predation on helpless people and animals: this is the only way they can reproduce. They need to eat live food to survive. The research is just beginning, my friend, but it is extremely exciting. Here, I collected it during my travels in Brazil My first specimens of cone flies. Simply put, the two species of flies are remarkably similar. You have to look at the shades of color to tell them apart, and you have to measure them with the most sensitive instruments. That's how I identified you yesterday. of samples."

Agassiz pulled a stool over, "Now, let's see your poor thigh, shall we?" Lowell tried to speak, but his lips quivered up and down. "Oh, don't worry, Lowell!" Agassiz laughed suddenly, "You felt the bug on your leg and you brushed it away?" "I killed it, too," Lovell reminded him. Agassi took out a scalpel from the drawer, "OK. Dr. Holmes, you use the knife to cut into the center of the wound and pluck it out." "Are you sure, Agassiz?" Lowell asked nervously. Holmes swallowed and dropped to his knees.He found the spot on the ankle for the knife, then looked up into his friend's face.Lowell grinned and stared. "There won't be any pain, Lowell." Holmes assured with a calm expression that the two of them were just reassuring each other.Although Agassi was very close, he pretended not to hear.

Lowell nodded, gripping the edge of the stool tightly.Holmes followed Agassi's instructions and inserted the tip of the scalpel into the center of the swelling on Lowell's ankle.After pulling out the knife, I saw a firm white maggot, no more than four millimeters long, writhing on the tip of the knife: alive. "That's it! A beautiful cone fly!" Agassi laughed triumphantly.He began checking Lowell's wound for any maggots, and bandaged his ankle.He lovingly put the maggots on his hand, "Look, Lowell, that poor little fly has only a few seconds to lay its eggs before you kill it, only time to lay one. Your wound Not deep, it will all heal quickly and your body will be great again. But think about how the wound on your leg swells when you get a maggot in it, how you feel when it tears some tissue. Imagine hundreds of maggots. Now imagine thousands of maggots—spreading through your body all the time."

Lowell opened his mouth and laughed so hard that the ends of his beard fell to his forehead. "Did you hear that, Holmes? I'll be fine!" He smiled and hugged Agassi, and then hugged Holmes.Then he began to think about what it meant to Judge Healy, and what it meant to the Dante Club. As he wiped his hands with a towel, Agassi's face turned serious. "Another thing, dear fellows. The strangest thing actually. These little creatures, they don't belong here, they don't belong in New England, they don't belong anywhere near. They're native to this hemisphere, it seems Definitely. But they can only survive in hot and humid climates. I saw a large group in Brazil not long ago, but we never saw them in Boston. No one has ever recorded them, neither Exact naming and nothing else. How did they get here? I really can't figure it out. Maybe it came here by accident from the livestock that came with the ship, or..." Agassiz said in a detached way. Talking about the situation in a humorous tone, "It doesn't matter. These things can't survive in a northern climate like ours. It's just our luck. Fortunately, it's so cold that if those bugs did get here, they would have frozen to death gone."

It seems that fear has gone away happily. Lowell has completely forgotten his bad luck, and his painful experience has brought him the joy of the rest of his life.But as he walked out of the museum side by side with Holmes in silence, there was one thing that bothered him. Holmes was the first to break the silence. "I've blindly followed Barneyhout's conclusions from newspaper reports. Healey didn't die from a blow to the head! Those bugs weren't exactly Dante's moving scene or some decorative scene, so we recognize it but Ding writes about punishment. They are put on people to inflict pain," Holmes said quickly, "these bugs are not decorations, they are his weapons!" "Our Satan not only wants his victims to die, but to suffer them, as the ghosts in the Inferno suffer. The state between life and death involves both, but is neither." Lowe Will said to Holmes, and took his arm. "Look at the pain you've been through. Holmes, I've felt something eat me inside of me, bite me. Even though it may only eat a small piece of tissue, I feel like it's going through My blood goes straight to my heart. That maid is telling the truth." "Indeed!" Holmes said in amazement, "This means that Healy..." They now knew what kind of pain Healy had suffered, which cannot be expressed in words.The Chancellor had intended to go to the country house on Saturday morning, and his body was not found until Tuesday.In the four days before his death, thousands of cone flies devoured him alive, his internal organs... his brain... inch by inch, hour by hour, everywhere and all the time. bite. Holmes observes the insects in the glass jar they brought back from Agassiz. "Lowell, I have something to say. But I don't want you to quarrel with me because of this." "Pietro Bucky." Holmes nodded hesitantly. "That seems at odds with what we know about him, doesn't it?" Lowell asked. "It overturns all our speculations!" "Think about this: Bucky is full of resentment, irascibility, and frequent drinking. There's no way he's going to behave in such a methodical, utterly brutal way. Can you see signs of it in him? No Wrong, Bucky may have tried to do something to show that he made a mistake in coming to America. But is it possible for him to reproduce Dante's punishment exactly? We were wrong all the way, Lo Will, like salamanders after the rain, every time we turn a leaf, a different salamander crawls out from under the leaf." Holmes was flailing his arms wildly. "What are you doing?" Lowell asked.Longfellow's house was only a short distance away, and they were supposed to go to Craigie's. "There's an empty wagon ahead. I'd like to take a second look at the worms with a microscope. I hope Agassiz didn't kill the maggots - it would be easier to reveal the truth of nature if they weren't killed. I don't believe in these insects Dead as he said, there might be a lot we can figure out about murder from these creatures. Agassiz doesn't believe in evolution, which prevents him from coming up with further ideas." "Holmes, that's his line." Holmes ignored Lowell's skepticism, "Great scientists can sometimes be obstacles in the way of science, Lowell. Revolutions are not started by people who wear glasses. Those who need hearing aids also listen." No first whispers of nascent truth. Just last month I read a book about Sandwich Island in which an old Fijian man was brought to Sandwich Island by a group of foreigners, but he Pray that one day he will return home so that, as is the custom in the Fijian Islands, his son will be able to make his wisdom known. Wouldn't his son Pietro, after Dante's death, tell everyone that the poet's intention was not to tell us that he really Have you ever been to hell and heaven? It’s not uncommon for a son to figure out what his father thinks.” Some fathers but not all.Lowell watched Holmes climb into the cab of the cab and thought of little Holmes.