150 RE.SEARCHES IN HELMINTHOLOGY AND PARASITOLOGY. 



they impoverish their hosts. Prof. L. believed that they did not 

 affect the wholesomeness of the fish as food, and perhaps when cooked 

 with the fish were e({ually good and nutritious. Like others, he felt 

 an antipathy to the worms, and he was in the habit of scraping them 

 off from the roes of smoked herring before eating these. He took 

 the opportunity of adding, what was already well known to natu- 

 ralists, that most animals are infested with parasites, which were 

 transmitted by feeding on one another. The remedy against trans- 

 mission was heat. He who uses only well-cooked meats need have 

 no apprehension of worms from such food. 



[November, 1878. No. 465. See Bibliography.] 



/Woficcs of Gordii/s in the LockroacJi and Leech. — Prof. Leidy ex- 

 hibited a Gordius, which had been submitted to him by Dr. Robert 

 Meade Smith, of this city, with the note that "a servant killed a 

 large cockroach (Blatta orientalis ?) in the kitchen, and threw it into 

 a tumbler of water, and had then noticed, as she described it, one 

 of its legs growing and swimming off. " The Gordius is nine inches 

 long, chocolate brown, with darker spots of the same, attenuated 

 anteriorly with the head rounded, and the tail spiral and at the end 

 si ightl}^ compressed and roundly truncated. Thickness of the worm 

 anteriorly i-5th of a line ; posteriorly 2-5thsof a line. The species 

 is probably Gordius aqiiaticus. 



Prof. Leid}^ further remarked that twenty years ago he had col- 

 lected from Lily Pond, R. L, a number of little leeches, of two 

 species of Clepsine, which were much infested with delicate hair- 

 worms coiled up in the interior of the bod3\ The Clepsines were 

 the fourth to the third of an inch in length. The most frequent of 

 the species had two eyes ; the other had three pairs of eyes. The 

 leeches contained from one to five of the hair-worms, ranging from 

 10 lines to two inches in length. The worms appear to pertain to 

 a species of Gordius, which, from its .slender character, may be 

 named (lordius tenuis. The worm is white or cream-colored, but 

 has become brown as preserved in alcohol. It is attenuated ante- 

 riorly, with the head end tapering and conical. The posterior end 

 is curv^ed, thickened, and obtu.sely rounded. A short oesophagus 

 is succeeded by a .simple, straight, capacious intestine imperforate 

 at the posterior extremity. A worm of two inches in length meas- 

 ured 0.06 mm. near the head end, 0.14 mm. at the middle, and 0.12 

 mm. at the tail end. A specimen 10 lines long measured at the 

 middle o. i mm. thick. 



