(358 Notices of Irish Entozoa. 



ing the microscope found that the whole had a parenchyma- 

 tous, solid appearance, except at one end, where a contained 

 body, reminding me of & foetus wrapped up in its membranes, 

 was distinctly visible : Fig 32, e. This part I found to be 

 the bothriated animal, and in several other specimens which 

 I examined on the same day, the same phenomena occurred 

 in all. 



On removing the pressure the animals resumed their origin 

 nal appearance, contracted their lateral outline into various 

 forms, and pushed out and retracted the obcordate proboscis. 



On Monday the 8th of October I examined similar tumors 

 attached to the duodenum of a whiting, and one from another 

 blockan ; and on the 10th, various specimens of the same 

 kind from several parts of the abdominal cavity of the red 

 gurnard {Trigla pini), and of the common grey gurnard (TV. 

 Gurnardus). In both the latter, the specimens were more 

 immature than any I had previously examined, the animals 

 being more transparent, and the obcordate process less fully 

 developed, and not satisfactorily exhibiting the bristly arma- 

 ture; but the bothriated animal was in all respects perfect, and 

 precisely the same as those that I had examined in the other 

 fishes. The containing sac, too, in the grey gurnard espe- 

 cially, was unusually tough, and of a deep brown colour. — 

 The bothriated animal of these specimens, when compressed 

 between two slips of glass, was particularly beautiful. In 

 some specimens all the four rostella were protruded, forming 

 the most gracefully curved outlines, and seeming like trans- 

 parent crystal, adorned with innumerable hooks of similar ap- 

 pearance, as if formed of the same material, arranged with the 

 most admirable symmetry, and an exquisiteness of finishing 

 that might put human art, in its greatest triumphs, to the 

 blush on account of its imperfection, perfect as it is. 



And yet we are to be told that the Entozoa are beings of 

 chance, that they are of equivocal generation, self-formed, and 

 originating from some fortuitous concourse or combination of 

 atoms, some clot of effused lymph, or a little intestinal mu- 

 cus ! But I shall have, at another time, to comment more 

 fully on the old theory, which has been so blindly (in my 

 opinion at least) adopted by many of the first physiologists 

 and naturalists of the present day. We know little or nothing, 

 it is true, of the origin of the Entozoa, but because we are as 

 yet ignorant of this, and may long continue to be so, are we 

 therefore, in the mean time, to attribute to chance, or acci- 

 dent, the formation of beings so perfect, and as wonderful in 

 their kind, and as properly constitutioned and constructed for 

 their mode of life, as any others in the vast field of vital be- 



