590 History of Luminescence 



at Friday Harbor, Washington, which presented all the characteris- 

 tics of self-luminosity. 



Pteropod molluscs were called luminous by W. Baird (1831), 

 F. D. Bennett (1837) , and Giglioni (1870) , and heteropod molluscs 

 by W. Keferstein,^^ but the observations have not been confirmed. 



Two additional phyla of marine animals contain undoubted lumi- 

 nous species, the Enteropneusta and the Nemertea. Although the 

 phyla have been recognized for many years, discovery of luminosity 

 is recent. The luminescence of Balanoglossus minutus, one of the 

 Enteropneusta was first noted by Panceri (1875) at Naples and the 

 light of the nemertean, Emplectonema Kandai, by S. Kanda (1939) 

 in Aomori Bay, Japan, in 1936. 



A luminous bryozoan, Acanthodesia serrata, has been described 

 in 1950 by K. Kato, but several earlier reports (e. g,, Landsborough, 

 1842) of luminosity are dubious. 



Living Fish 



Early records of fish luminescence suffer from the doubt that the 

 light may have come from the dead animal and be due to luminous 

 bacteria or, if the fish was living, result from small luminous or- 

 ganisms in the sea water, stimulated by the moving fish and out- 

 lining its body in fire. Although the ancients spoke of a " Lucerna 

 piscis " or lantern fish, and many records of luminous dead fish exist, 

 true fish luminescence reports are mostly from the nineteenth cen- 

 tury. The question is still unsettled as to whether Marcgrave's 

 (1642) luminous fish, " jurucapeba " contained symbiotic luminous 

 bacteria or not (see Chapter XIV) . 



A. Risso's (1810: 53) statement concerning the " Chimere arcti- 

 que," the Chimaera monstrosus of Linnaeus, whose " snout is filled 

 with a soft viscous substance which oozes from numerous pores and 

 emits a quantity of luminous rays during the night " probably refers 

 to luminous bacteria. However, his paper of 1820 on " Scopeles 

 observees dans la mer de Nice " showed the prominent skin struc- 

 tures which are the photophores of these fish. These skin structures 

 were also known to A. Valenciennes (1794-1865) , and in the His- 

 toire Naturelles des Poissons (Paris, 1828-1849) , a considerable 

 number of deep sea fish are described (22, 1849), including " Le 

 scopele lumineux " which had a luminous organ near the eye. 



In 1833 Anastasio Cocco (1799-1854) described deep sea fish from 



"In Bronn's Klassen und Ordnung des Tierreichs (III-2) , on Malacozoa (1862- 

 1866) , W. Keferstein wrote (p. 839) that " Heteropoda contribute to sea phospho- 

 rescence, and in Pterotracheates I have myself admired the beautiful bluish light 

 which streams out at the slightest stimulation, especially from Nucleus." 



