Word: culex
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Professor Wendell Clausen has inaugurated a new seminar this semester entitled Classical Philology 299b, The Culex: an Introduction to Latin Textual Criticism. Among the recondite aims of this course will be "practice in reading and collating MSS, making an apparatus criticus, and establishing a "text." It may be helpful to those ready to embark on so perilous a trek in the groves of Academe to halt a moment and take heed of A.E. Housman's published Remarks on the Culex (1902). THE EDITORS...
...authors of the Culex and Ciris and Aetna were mediocre poets, and worse, and the gods and men and booksellers whom they affronted by existing allotted them for transcription to worse than mediocre scribes. The Ciris was indited by a twaddler, and the Culex and Aetna by stutterers: but what they stuttered and twaddled was Latin, not double-Dutch; and great part of it is now double-Dutch and Latin no more ... Here then, between poets capable of much and copyists capable of anything, is a promising field for the exercise of tact and caution; a prudent editor will...
...soon developed that Japanese B is transmitted to humans by the bite of a mosquito, Culex tritaeniorhynchus. Only the females are venomous bloodsuckers; the gentle males stick to flower nectar. All well and good, but mosquitoes disappear in winter. Where did they fill up with encephalitis virus in the early summer to pump it into humans? The answer was an animal, no doubt, with seasonal habits-one easily infected with the virus but not made seriously ill or killed by it. That pointed to young animals, which would promptly develop antibodies. The only creatures that fitted these specifications were birds...
Meanwhile, because the virus is carried by a mosquito (Culex tarsails) which breeds in stagnant water, valley residents were going all out to put oil on pools and spray everything in sight...
Except for the shrill whine of their wings, most varieties make no sound audible to man. But the Cornell researchers caged four of the peskiest species-Anopheles quadrimaculatus (malaria), Aedes aegypti (yellow fever), Aedes albopictus (dengue) and Culex pipiens (New Jersey) -and confronted them with a microphone and high-powered amplifier. A surprising variety of noises, resembling bird calls, emerged. Mosquitoes, it turned out, have voices in the middle ranges of human hearing (frequencies of 250 to 1,500 cycles per second). Females bellow; male voices are thin and high-pitched...