MYRIAPOD S. 57 i 



young ones ; but it seems doubtful if be bimself ever attacks fresb or 

 living vegetables ; he seems to be one of Nature's many vidangeurs, 

 and, because be is found minding bis business and eating up rotten- 

 ness, be is accused of producing it. As well might we say that our 

 sewer-men produce typhus and cholera. But he has even been charged 

 with haying caused the potato-disease! because he was found laboring 

 to remove the affected tubers. Beware, ye brave surgeons who fight 

 With zymotic demons and risk your own lives to lift up stricken hu- 

 manity, lest ye be arraigned for producing all the long catalogue of 

 human ills that figure in our sanitary statistics ! 



Our captive has no eyes ; he has, however, an " ocellus," a mere 

 pigment-speck behind the base of each of bis fifteen-jointed antennas, 

 and he has the smallest possible threadlet of an optic nerve. I suspect 

 he cannot see, in the ordinary sense, but can distinguish between the 

 light with which he has nothing to do, and the darkness in which he 

 feels his way about with his antenna? when doing his duty like a humble 

 vegetarian jackal, or adjutant. 



The Myriapods have been placed at different times in different 

 classes of the animal kingdom. In one famous system we find them 

 under the head of Crustacea ; another, in remote times, ranged them 

 with the Hemiptera and Ortlioptera as " insects which only undergo a 

 partial metamorphosis." They have slight affinities with both, and 

 even with the Annelids ; like the latter, they grow in length by the 

 successive addition of new segments between the penultimate and 

 anal. The lower subdivision, the Chilognatha, by the situation of 

 their reproductive orifices, seem to betray Crustacean relationships ; 

 but we remember that, in the first phase of their development, they 

 displayed three pairs of legs only, like the typical hexapod insect. 

 They appear to stand out the strong, well-marked, first link of that 

 long chain which bridges over the mighty gulf which rolls between 

 the creeping worm and the flying insect. The Myriapod is the lowest 

 articulate animal, the Annelid the highest annulose i. e., according to 

 the old scheme of classification, the latter term has recently been used 

 with a widely-extended signification. Ten years ago the subdivision 

 Chilopoda consisted of four families, including ninety-four genera; 

 and the lower subdivision, Chilognatha, of four families, containing 

 seventy-five genera ; a tremendous total of variations of a type ; but 

 since then they have been shuffled and cut, and lumped and split, like 

 the German states, till nobody knows which is which. 



" An articxdation complete in all its mechanical appliances is not 

 produced in the animal kingdom below the Myriapod. A joint is the 

 symbol of organic superiority ; it is not an arbitrary symbol ; it is a 

 unit in an assemblage of signs which proclaim a newer and higher- 

 combination in the arrangements which constitute ' life.' At this limit 

 in the animal series the fluids and the solids of the organism undergo 

 a signal exaltation of standard. The system of the cbylaqueous fluid 



