210 [ June, 



June Srd. 



Vice-President Bridges in the Chair. 



A letter was read from Edward Wilson, Esq., dated Lydstip House, 

 Pembrokeshire, Wales, 15th April, 1851, giving information of a case 

 containing books and specimens of Natural History, which he had for- 

 warded for the Academy. 



Also a letter from the President of the National Society of Agricul- 

 ture, &c., of Lyons, dated 23rd December, 1850, accompanying the 

 donation by that Society, of its Annals for 1849, and '50. 



Mr. Cassin read a communication from Col. Geo. A. McCall, U. S. A., 

 entitled ''Some account of Birds found in Western Texas and New 

 Mexico, with descriptions of new species ;" which was intended for 

 publication in the Proceedings, and referred to the following com- 

 mittee : Mr. Cassin, Dr. Watson and Mr. E. Harris. 



Dr. J. K. Mitchell exhibited a specimen of a fungus growing upon 

 a piece of decayed white-oak wood, which when recent is so luminous 

 as to attract insects to it at night. 



Dr. Leidy remaiked, that, it had occurred to him whilst examining the mole 

 cricket, referred to at the meeting of May 20th, that if the fragments of the 

 insect were placed under favorable conditions, the fungoid matter in the interior 

 of the insect might develope itself into an external form of fungus. He accord- 

 ingl)' placed them in a small glass case, with some moist sphagnum, and allowed 

 them to remain until the present time. Dr. L. exhibited the glass case with the 

 fragments, each having sprouting out of it one, two, or three, elongated, conical 

 stipes of a cream color, from 3 lines to 1 inch long, and from i a line to I2 lines 

 in diameter. Dr. Leidy continued, in examining insects for entophyta and en- 

 tozoa, he had found the hemiptera remarkably free from them, which he con- 

 siders an important fact. Those insects which eat large quantities of vegetable 

 solid food, especially such as eat decaying substances, are very much infected 

 with parasites. The spontaneous generation of entophyta and entozoa finds but 

 few advocates at the present day. Late researches lead us to suspect that many, 

 if not all, entozoa, pass part of their life out of the animals in which they are 

 known as parasites, under forms different from those when within the animals. 



The entrance of the parasites into other animals is effected probably in two 

 ways: with the food of the latter, or by boring from the exterior. The former 

 method is probably the most frequent in aerial animals ; and both methods are 

 frequent in aquatic animals, because, in the latter case, the water affords a good 

 vehicle for the approach of the parasites to any part of the body of the animals 

 to be infected. 



As hemipterous insects suck the juices only of plants or animals, through a 

 delicate proboscis, they are placed under circumstances the most favorable of all 

 animals to avoid taking in with their food, ova, spores, or developed animals and 

 plants of a parasitic character; whilst insects like papulus, crickets, etc., or 

 gulus amongst myriapoda, from their eating decaying substances, swallowing 

 large morsels of such food, are very apt to take in parasites. 



Frequently I have detected adhering to insects and annelida, while living, 

 cryptogamic sporules, which under favorable circumstances, before or after the 



