326 THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE. 



blood thus initiated does (as it seems to do) suffice to give 

 rise to the germs and fungus-growths which afterwards 

 constitute such all-important elements of the disease. 

 The former is the view which has been most widely 

 adopted : and yet two of the ablest writers on muscar- 

 dine, after the most careful investigations with reference 

 to this very point, came to the opposite conclusion. 

 These observers, who adopted, in its entirety, the belief 

 in the possibility of engendering muscardine de novo^ 

 were M. Guerin-Meneville and M. Robinet. The 

 conclusions of the former especially were based upon 

 positive and apparently unambiguous observations. 



The blood-corpuscles of the silk-worm during life are 

 elliptic or more or less elongated, but after death they 

 are always found to be spherical. When a little blood 

 is abstracted from a healthy worm, the corpuscles are 

 elongated at first, though they speedily assume the 

 spherical condition ; and, when in this latter state, they 

 begin to exhibit amoeboid protrusions_, although such 

 changes of shape are never seen in healthy blood- 

 corpuscles immediately after they have been drawn from 

 the body. M. Guerin-Meneville observed that in dead 

 silk-worms, and also in the cases where blood had 

 been drawn from living animals during the very early 

 stages of the disease, the spherical amoeboid cor- 

 puscles contained much larger granulations than usual j 

 and that some of them tended towards the periphery 

 of the corpuscles, from which they ultimately made 

 their exit. These little bodies were ovoid, and from 



