vious touches, they keep on moving for weeks.
In entering the mouth the sting did not reach the cervical ganglia,
or sudden death would have ensued and we should have before our eyes
corpses which would go bad in a few days, instead of fresh carcases
in which traces of life remain manifest for a long time. The cephalic
nerve-centres have been spared.

What is wounded then, to procure this profound inertia of the
poison-fangs? I regret that my anatomical knowledge leaves me undecided
on this point. Are the fangs actuated by a special ganglion? Are they
actuated by fibres issuing from centres exercising further functions? I
leave to anatomists equipped with more delicate instruments than I the
task of elucidating this obscure question. The second conjecture appears
to me the more probable, because of the palpi, whose nerves, it seems to
me, must have the same origin as those of the fangs. Basing our argument
on this latter hypothesis, we see that the Calicurgus has only one means
of suppressing the movement of the poisoned pincers without affecting
the mobility of the palpi, above all without injuring the cephalic
centres and thus producing death, namely, to reach with her sting the
two fibres actuating the fangs, fibres as fine as a hair.

I insist upon this point. Despite their extreme delicacy, these two
filaments must be injured directly; for, if it were enough for the sting
to inject its poison "there or thereabouts," the nerves of the palpi, so
close to the first, would undergo the same intoxication as the adjacent
region and would leave those appendages motionless. The palpi move;
they retain their mobility for a considerable period; the action of the
poison, therefore, is evidently situated in the nerves of the fangs.
There are two of these nerve-filaments, very fine, very difficult to
discover, even by the professional anatomist. The Calicurgus has
to reach them one after the other, to moisten them with her poison,
possibly to transfix them, in any case to operate upon them in a very
restricted manner; so that the diffusion of the virus may not involve
the adjoining parts. The extreme delicacy of this surgery explains
why the weapon remains in the mouth so long; the point of the sting is
seeking and eventually finds the tiny fraction of a millimetre where the
poison is to act. This is what we learn from the movements of the palpi
close to the motionless fangs; they tell us that the Calicurgi are
vivisectors of a