196 © Scientific Intelligence— Zoology. 
Electrical Light on Bayonets, §e—An officer of the Algerian 
army, sent a note relative to certain unusual phenomena of electricity 
observed in Africa. During a violent storm on the 25th of Septem- 
ber 1840, he had observed that the arms of the men, when piled in 
stands, exhibited no symptoms of the electric fluid playing about 
them ; but when the men carried them, the points of the bayonets 
were strongly luminous, not, however, giving out any sparks. The 
drops of rain that fell during the storm on the beards and mustachios 
of the men, remained hanging from them in a state of phosphores- 
cence. When the hair was wiped, the phenomenon ceased ; but was 
renewed the moment any fresh drops fell on it.—Literary Gazette, 
No. 1269. 
ZOOLOGY. 
“On the Corpuscles of the Blood.’—By Martin Barry, M.D., 
F.R.SS. L. and E.* 
After remarking that no clear conception has hitherto existed of 
the mode in which the floating corpuscles of the blood conduce to 
nourishment, the author states that he has found every structure he 
has examined to arise out of corpuscles having the same appearance 
as the corpuscles of the blood. The following are the tissues which 
he has submitted to actual observation, and which have given the 
above result, namely, the cellular, the nervous, and the muscular ; 
besides cartilage, the coats of blood-vessels, several membranes, the 
tables and cells of the epithelium, the pigmentum nigrum, the ciliary 
processes, the crystalline lens itself, and even the spermatozoon and 
the ovum. 
The author then traces the nucleus of the blood-corpuscle into the 
pus-gobule ; showing that every stage in the transition presents a 
definite figure. The formation of the pus-globule out of the nucleus 
of the blood-corpuscle is referable to the same process, essentially, as 
that by means of which the germinal spot comes to fill the germinal 
vesicle in the ovum. This process, which, in a former memoir, he 
had traced in the corpuscles of the blood, he now shews to be uni- 
versal, and nowhere more obvious than in the reproduction of the 
tables of the epithelium. ‘The epithelium-cylinder seems to be con- 
stituted, not by coalescence of two objects previously single, as has 
* The Memoir of which the above is a notice, was read before the Royal 
Society of London in June 1841, 
