Word: snailing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Nile Valley, which teems with many strange forms of lower animal life, lives a terrifying snail. It spreads a parasitic disease, schistosomiasis, which has afflicted Egyptians since the Pharaohs; the parasite's eggs have been found in preserved human viscera 3,000 years old. For the past five years, a hardbitten, stubborn-jawed, 70-year-old U.S. doctor named Claude Heman Barlow has worked mightily to deliver Egyptians from this ancient plague. His specialty: killing snails...
Schistosomiasis, caused by a tiny blood fluke which burrows under the skin of river bathers, causes fever, hives, bladder infection, sometimes cirrhosis of the liver. The parasite has a complicated life cycle: its eggs, hatching in warm water, develop larvae which enter snails, there develop to a second, man-attacking larval stage called cercariae or flukes. A single snail may produce 32,000 flukes...
Next to the choice of the war memorial, the speed of its construction the most important question. The road through the alumni committee, the President and Fellows, the drive for finances, and the actual construction may be long and winding, but it need not be traveled at a snail's pace. It was 1927 before the Memorial Chapel was built, and it may well be 1950 before the new war memorial materializes unless further six-month lapses of activity are averted...
Under the title-heading of "Compleat Conchophilist" [TIME, Sept. 16], I am happy to find that others enjoy and appreciate as much as I the joy, interest and advantages of "snail-watching," but regret the sense of levity with which you handled the subject...
...opposed to the general concept of a snail's life and locomotion . . . I have found that the snail is in actuality a fast-moving animal in relation to his sphere and the relativity of distances. . . . Considering the great heights to which he can lay his track, the rough terrain over which he can glide, the obstacles which he tackles and surmounts . . . . the tenacity of purpose in achieving his goal, and a total lack of the all-too-human traits of indirection and lassitude-the snail is to be considered among the higher of the living animals...