Word: activa
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Lehane also chronicles the vita activa of the flea as vaudevillian; the flea as athlete (one "can jump about 150 times its own length along, and about 80 times its length up"); the flea as spreader of plague and, in the case of the male, even as sexual tyrant. In mating, says Lehane, a man obviously sympathetic to the underflea, "he grasps her abdomen with his antennae, and sensuously brushes her parts with a wispy membrane. Then violence comes. Copulation lasts about three hours, sometimes as long as nine. ... So sharp and indelicate are the hooks and spines...
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