Proc. Roy. Soc. Victoria, 28 (N.S.), Pt. If., 1916.] 



Aht. XII. — A (Comparative Examination of the Blood of 

 Certain Australian Animals. 



By GWYNNETU BUCHANAN, M.Sc. 



(With Plates XVIII. and XIX.). 

 [Read August 12th, 1915]. 



The study of the histology of the blood is a comparatively recent 

 one. since it appears only to have been taken up in earnest in 

 the latter half of the 19th century. These early workers were neces- 

 sarily hampered by imperfections in the apparatus at their 

 disposal. Gulliver (I) in 187") published the results of an exhaus- 

 tive examination of the shapes and sizes of red corpuscles of 

 vertebrates, and this had been preceded by a paper on the taxo- 

 nomic import of the nucleus of these cells. He was followed in 

 1878 and *7it by the appearance of two publications by Erhlich, 

 whose name in connection with histology and reactions of the blood 

 is. of course, a household word to all students of the subject to- 

 day. So lately as 18.92, however, Newton Parker (2) writes: "The 

 fact that the white corpuscles of the blood are not all alike is now 

 well known in the case of most vertebrates, although it is not pos- 

 sible, in most cases at any rate, to state definitely whether these 

 do or do not correspond to stages in the development of one and 

 the same thing, and whether different functions are performed by 

 these different kinds of leucocytes." 



In later years the intimate relation between the state of the 

 blood and various conditions of disease, together with the very 

 perfect methods of manipulation which the modern knowledge of 

 staining and fixing has evolved, have produced an extensive litera- 

 ture >-ii the histology of the blood. The work done in this direction 

 being principally descriptions of pathological conditions or com- 

 parisons ,.f normal blood with that of diseased individuals, is. 

 mainly confined to an examination of man and the domesticated 

 animals. In a recent paper (■''>) Drs. Cleland and Harvey Johnston 

 have, however, endeavoured to point out that some indication of 

 the probable line of evolution of vertebrate forms may be deduced 

 from a comparative study of the shapes and sizes of the red cells 

 of the blood. In the present paper I have essayed to collect some 



