866 On the Form of the Globules of 



the public, M. Mandl has been led to examine the blood in 

 different animals. The menagerie of the Royal Garden, always 

 open to those who seriously desire to profit by its riches in 

 order to advance science, has afforded him an opportunity of 

 greatly multiplying his observations on this subject, and of 

 arriving at very unexpected results. He at first established 

 that in a great number of mammifera whose blood had not yet 

 been examined by the microscope, for example, the papion, a 

 guenon, a sajou, the coati, the kinkajou, the elephant, the tapir, 

 the hemionus, and the stag, the globules are circular as in all 

 the other mammifera already studied with regard to this par- 

 ticular ; but he found afterwards that in the dromedary it is 

 quite otherwise. There, the globules of the blood, instead of 

 being circular, are elliptical as in birds, reptiles, and fishes. 



The dromedai'y belongs, as we know, to a small natural 

 family, in the order of ruminants, and is represented in the 

 Old World by the genus camel, and in the New Continent by 

 the genus lama. It became consequently very interesting to 

 see if the singular anomaly offered by the blood of the drome- 

 dary would be found also in the blood of the lamas. In order 

 to resolve this question, M. Mandl has taken advantage of an 

 alpaca in the menagerie of the musevmi, and, in the note ad- 

 dressed to the Academy, he announces the fact that in the 

 blood of this animal the globules are also of an elliptical form. 



Your commissioners have, along with M. Mandl, repeated 

 tht'se two observations, and are satisfied of their accuracy. In 

 drinedaries of both sexes, as well as in the alpaca, the globules 

 of the blood are certainly elliptical : their great diameter is 

 about xsjth of a millimetre, and their small diameter about 

 jjgth. These corpuscles are, as you see, smaller than those 

 of any known bird, reptile, or fish, and approach in their 

 dimensions the globules of the other mammifera. The ellip- 

 tical central ^pot, which they present, appears also to result 

 from a depression rather than from the presence of a promi- 

 nent nucleus ; finally, it is also proper to remark that the blood 

 of these animals, as well as that of the other mammifera, con- 

 tains, besides these red globules, certain white and rounded 

 corpuscles of more considerable volume, corpuscles which M. 

 Mandl believes to be formed of fibrine. We shall add farther. 



