author's abstbact of this paper issued 

 by the bibliographic service, october 5 



ANABIOSIS OF THE EARTHWORM 



PETER SCHMIDT 



Agricultural College in Petrograd 



The remarkable biological phenomenon, now known under the 

 name of 'anabiosis/ given it by Preyer ('91), was already observed 

 in 1701 by the first Dutch microscopist, Anton Leeuwenhoek. 

 Studying microscopical animals, he found that some of them, 

 namely, the representatives of the present groups of Tardigrada 

 and Rotatoria, living in the moss of the roofs and in the sand of 

 the roof-gutters, can be completely dried up and retain for a 

 long time their vitality in such desiccated state. If after some 

 weeks or months of preservation one places in water the dried 

 bodies of these animals, they quickly become swollen and in a 

 short time the animals revive. 



The same observation was made afterwards by Needliam (1745) 

 and Baker (1764) on some Nematodes belonging to Anguillu- 

 lidae; Baker revived these microscopical worms after twenty- 

 seven years of preservation in the desiccated state. 



The famous Italian biologist of the eighteenth century, Abbott 

 Spallanzani (1777), repeated all the experiments on the Tardi- 

 grada and Rotatoria of the previous authors; he came to the 

 same conclusions and cleared up many interesting details of the 

 phenomenon. 



For a long time these experiments on resuscitation of micro- 

 scopic animals had interested the scientific world rather more as 

 a curiosity. But in the second half of the last century the at- 

 tention of the biologist was called to the fact of the resuscitation 

 in connection with the question of the origin of life and, spon- 

 taneous generation. 



The property of resuscitation of Rotatoria and Tardigrada 

 was once more car^ully studied by Doyere ('42) and the resusci- 

 tiation of Anguillulidae by Davaine ('56). Afterwards this 



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