If the water, which the doko has chosen for its habitation becomes dried up, it wraps itself in a kind of a capsule of mud […]

to ship freight by railroad

The Globe editors have marked it with the obolus according to their explanation in the preface: Whenever a lacuna occurs too great to be filled out with any approach to certainty by conjecture, we have marked the passage with an obolus (†).

Coordinate term: astroturfer