Next Contents Previous


Picture -1

-1. We have now come down to 5 centimeters above the girl's hand, and with a magnifying glass we can distinguish the grooves in its skin. On it we notice some small organisms (1): water mites and bacteria. They got there, probably, when the girl put her hand in the water of a ditch nearby. In the right hand bottom corner inside the quarter circle there is a bacterium, which however is so small that we can't see it. In the cut we see a section of the epidermis. In a real cut in a finger not all the detail shown here could be distinguished, but it is interesting to include it. The malaria mosquito is clearly visible: its large compound eyes (2), feelers (3), and jaws (4); also its proboscis (5), with which it is busy stinging the poor child. We see the flexible sheath (6) bent in a curve as it touches the skin.

1 cm. in picture = 0.1 cm. = 10-1 cm. = 1 mm.
Scale = 10:1 (Enlarged 10 times)