Word: lice
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...British Museum of Natural History was in grateful receipt last week of a strange new gift-500,000 Mallophaga, the world's leading collection of bird lice...
...from skirmishes in India to the trenches of World War I. Instead of retiring to his London town house, which bristles with lion and panther heads, he teamed up with his young cousin, Zoologist Theresa Clay, and mounted an offensive against the Mallophaga. He and Theresa believe that the lice can be used as a small-scale model of animal evolution...
...Best Muslin. Over the years, the colonel and his cousin have scoured the world for bird lice, visiting Syria, Africa, India, Arctic Russia, Estonia, Afghanistan, Arabia and Arizona. As soon as pack horses or native bearers arrive with the expedition at the hunting grounds, the colonel strolls out with his shotgun. As each bird bites the dust, he wraps it carefully in many folds of "the best butter muslin." When the bird's body begins to cool, the lice desert it for the muslin. Then the colonel and Theresa unwrap the muslin and shelter the displaced lice in labeled...
...Zoologist Clay, they offered an "unoccupied ecological niche": i.e., a place where some organism might manage to scratch out a living. Almost at once an ancient louse moved in, finding the feathers and skin debris a convenient source of food. As the early birds evolved into separate species, their lice evolved too, adapting themselves cleverly to each change in their hosts. Penguins have their lice; so do skylarks and ostriches. The extinct dodo and giant moa were undoubtedly lousy...
...Pinto had at least nine lives, and needed all of them. He was five times shipwrecked, 13 times put to slave labor. In China he was kept for two days, waist-deep in water, in a cistern crawling with leeches. Another time he put in 26 days in a lice-infested prison cell. The Burmans tortured him by dropping hot resin on his skin. A humane man himself, Pinto decided that his tormentors were simply retaliating for the brutalities that rakehell Portuguese had first inflicted on them...