324 Transactions of I In Society. 



Walter Charleton (1619-1707), one of the founders of the Royal 

 Society. Charleton asks us to "Consider the delicate contexture 

 of the Atoms in the Body of that smallest of animals, a Handworm,. 

 First, if we speculate the outside of that organical tenement of 

 life, a good Engyoscope [i.e. Microscope] will praesent our eyes 

 with not only an oval head, and therein a mouth, or prominent 

 snout, armed with an appendent proboscis, or trunk consisting of 

 many villous filaments contorted into a cone, wherewith it per- 

 forates the skin and sucks up the blood of our hands, but also 

 many thighs, legs, feet, toes, laterally ranged on each side ; many 

 hairy tufts on the tail, and many asperities and protuberances. 

 Then our reason if we contemplate the inside thereof, will discover 

 a great variety of organs necessary to the several functions of such 

 an Animal."* 



The first to publish a figure of the Acarus of scabies was the 

 quaintly superstitious writer, August Hauptmann, in the course of 

 a work on Baths, published in 1657. Hauptmann had discovered 



that certain natural baths (doubtless contain- 

 ing sulphur) were remedial against the itch. 

 He knew that the Acarus burrowed in the 

 thickness of the human skin, and he tells us 

 that " these vermicules, as far as I could make 

 them out clearly under the Microscope, pre- 

 sented to my eyes a monstrous form with 

 many long tails sticking out behind. My un- 

 skilled pen may thus construct a rough sketch 

 Fig. 37. — Sarcoptes thereof" (fig. 37). He goes on to narrate that 

 scabici, as pictured « tne 011 tline and aspect of these creatures are 



by August Haupt- ... ,. n .-, n -i i 



mann, 1657. similar to those of the worms called by 



the Germans Molben, which are frequently 

 generated like hairy dust in cheeses." f The comparison of the 

 Acari of scabies with those of cheese is perfectly just, a^d had 

 been made by Mouffet and other earlier writers. That similar 

 minute organisms might be the cause of the disease had already 

 been suggested by Hauptmann in a pamphlet published a few 

 years earlier,! i n which he assured his readers that fevers were 

 caused by such "worms or their eggs, and that very minute and 

 almost invisible animalcules are the cause of all deaths in men 

 and animals. The creatures are minute wormlets beyond the 



* Walter Charleton, " Physiologia Epicure- — Gassendo — Gharltoniana, or A 

 Fabrick of Science Natural upon the Hypothesis of Atoms." London, 1654, p. 115. 



t August Hauptmann, " Warmer Badt und Wasser Schatz," Frankfort a/M, 

 1675, p. 200. The volume contains more than the title implies, and includes 

 reprints and tractates jumbled together in a way that makes a complete biblio- 

 graphical description difficult. 



I August Hauptmann, " Epistola praeliminaris, Tractatui de viva mortis 

 imagine," Frankfort a/M, 1650. The work to which this was a preliminary was 

 never issued. 



