THE THREE VISITORS
the young will gnaw to death slowly day by day as they develop, nor will I discuss this unmeaning growth of cells which has made my body its soil. . . . Nor any one of our thousand infectious fevers that fall upon us—without reason, without justice. . . .
"Man is of all creatures the least subjected to internal parasites. In the brief space of a few hundred thousand years he has changed his food, his habitat and every attitude and habit of his life, and comparatively few species, thirty or forty at most, I am told, have been able to follow his changes and specialise themselves to him under these fresh conditions; yet even man can entertain some fearful guests. Every time you drink open water near a sheep pasture you may drink the larval liver fluke, which will make your liver a little township of vile creatures until they eat it up, until they swarm from its oozing ruins into your body cavity and destroy you. In Europe this is a rare fate for a man, but in China there are wide regions where the fluke abounds and rots the life out of thousands of people. . . . The fluke is but one sample of such feats of the Creator. An unwashed leaf of lettuce may be the means of planting a parasitic cyst in your brain to dethrone your reason; a feast of underdone pork may transfer to you from the swine the creeping death torture of trichinosis. . . . But all that men suffer in these matters is nothing to the suffering of the beasts. The torments of the beasts are finished and complete. My biological master tells me that he rarely opens a cod or dogfish without finding bunches of some sort of worm or suchlike pallid lodger in
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