288 ME. P. H. GOSSE ON THE CLASPEVG-ORGANS 



urine, of a variable colour." (Siebold's Comp. Anat. — Burnett's Transl. 1854, page 441 

 and note.) 



If tbis statement is correct, tbe penis is never used for tbe evacuation of urine: urine 

 being identified with that copious fluid which Dr. Burmeister compares to tbe meconium, 

 and which I have had repeated occasion to mention in these pages. But the frequent 

 recurrence of this white pulpy matter within the penis and manifestly ejected from it 

 appears to show its normal, if occasional, connexion with this organ. I cannot help 

 thinking of the thick white creamy substance, of an overpowering fetor, which I have 

 seen copiously discharged from the cloaca of Serpents, which, however, is said to be 

 the urine, "consisting mainly of uric acid" (Grant, Comp. Anat. p. 631). The oil- 

 globules may possibly look to a changed condition of spermatozoa in residue of semen 

 partly discharged from the organ, or to fatty degeneration of some tissue. 



More recently, my kind friend Mr. Robert M'Lachlan, F.R.S., has favoured me with 

 some correspondence on the subject. He mentions to me a fact, of which I was not 

 before aware, that a mass of spermatozoa is sometimes " excluded by other insects in 

 dying;" and this on the authority of the Rev. Alfred E. Eaton, M.A., whose words, in 

 a letter to him, my friend thus quotes : — " Oligoneuria rhenana [a May-fly, common on 

 the Rhine] discharges either spermatozoic paste, instead of spermatozoic liquid, or else 

 discharges spermatozoic cysts. I have introduced, into plate iii. of my promised work, 

 a figure of the lobes of the penis with the two threads of paste, or the tubules (as the 

 case may be) like transparent vermicelli, partly extruded. But nothing has been pub- 

 lished about this. In other Ephemeridce, the matter ejected is fluid." 



Tbe second of these alternatives is, I think, inadmissible. The matter is not contained 

 in a cyst, if this term implies an enclosing wall, but always as a mass of paste, unde- 

 fined, save by the cessation of its own substance. 



Yet later, I had occasion to examine several examples of the noble Papilio Gigon, from 

 Celebes. Within the expanded lip of the penis of one of these — protruding, but not 

 extruded — there was a rounded mass of the dried white pulp, which also was seen filling 

 the whole cylinder of the abnormally large organ. I easily detached an atom with a 

 needle, and transferred it, with a drop of water, to the compressorium of a microscope 

 (Powell's), subjecting it to graduated pressure with a square of thin glass. 



The appearance now was as of an infinite multitude of filaments, most unequal and 

 irregular in thickness and direction, anastomosing (or else crossing) at various intervals, 

 and enclosing excessively minute areas, having refractive power. At the edge, where 

 it thinned off to nothing, these areas resolved themselves into minute flattened corpuscles 

 of no definite form, but always with outlines irregularly sinuated, never angled or 

 pointed. These corpuscles, closely appressed in the denser parts, made the bright 

 interspaces, and their edges the darker network. Among them were a few yellowish 

 molecules, larger and more opaque, irregularly roundish, of various sizes, and also a 

 good many clear oil-globules, some few of Avhich last were drawn out into slender tails, 

 of the same substance. 



I have taken great pains to be accurate in describing what I saw (under a ^-in. power);, 

 but I fear it is not very intelligible. I had never before examined spermatozoa that 



