94 ZOOLOGY 



is rather more vital than would appear on the surface. It 

 cannot be explained away entirely on the grounds of technique, 

 although this probably has much to do with misinterpretation 

 of the facts. In 1925 several papers appeared which had a 

 distinct bearing on this matter. Describing the oogenesis of 

 Lumbricus, Harvey (44) maintains that the Golgi elements are 

 here represented by small bodies (spheroids), roughly of the 

 shape of a mammalian blood corpuscle, with a deeply staining 

 rim and a more lightly staining centre (Fig. 52, C). These are the 

 so-called platelets. Later in the year Gatenby and Nath (39) 

 criticised Harvey's work and said that the Golgi elements were 

 rods and not platelets. Their observations were made on the 

 same material. Harvey had attempted to give an account 

 of the various figures observed by different techniques such as 

 those of Da Fano, Kolatchew and Champy-Kull by suggesting 

 that the rodlets represented incomplete impregnation of the 

 deeply-staining rim in varying quantity. His suggestions are 

 based upon the assumption that Da Fano preparations at their 

 best give the nearest approach to the true picture. This assump- 

 tion appears to be open to criticism, although an alternative 

 suggestion is not obvious. In 1927 Harvey (45) described the 

 Golgi elements of the oocytes of Ciona intestinalis as argentophil 

 vesicles or irregular masses. Nath and Mohan (102) quite recently 

 have described the Golgi elements in the oogenesis of Periplaneta 

 americana as vesicular bodies with osmiophilic rims. It is not at 

 all clear how rims exist on vesicles, and as Nath, in 1928 (99), in an 

 account of the oogenesis of a spider, found crescentic Golgi 

 elements which he attributed to either incomplete blackening or 

 optical sections of vacuoles, it is a little difficult to place much 

 reliance on his view of the actual appearance of these bodies. 



Nath, in a letter to Nature (97), in 1926, has quite evidently 

 adopted the views of Parat, to which reference will be made later. 

 He speaks of the Golgi bodies as " rings which may also be 

 appropriately described as vacuoles with a sharp chromophilic rim 

 and a central chromophobic area " (the italics are ours). This 

 interpretation of the form and structure of the Golgi elements 

 he finds very satisfactory for the explanation of the formation of 



