154: Miscellaneous. 
year’s brood may be destroyed. On the other hand, if the larvee be 
allowed to be scattered over the fields or barn-yard, a plentiful supply 
of “weevils’’ for the next crop is secured. This method was pro- 
posed several years since by Prof. Henslow, but I have not been able 
to ascertain whether it has been used extensively in America.—Pro- 
ceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, vol. iv. 
p- 210. 
On the Characters and Intimate Structure of the Odoriferous Glands 
of the Invertebrata. By Dr. Lrrpy. 
Nature has supplied most or all animals with some means of de- 
fence or protection, through which their destruction is rendered 
limited. The character of such means varies exceedingly : some are 
encased in hard armour; some are endowed with great muscular 
strength, some with great rapidity of movement ; others trust to their 
minuteness, some to their colour ; others feign death ; many are fur- 
nished with formidable instruments, such as teeth, claws, aculei, &e. ; 
others are supplied with organs which emit an odour so offensive that 
an aggressor is frequently compelled to leave what otherwise would 
have been its victim, &c. It is to the last-mentioned organs to 
which I at present wish to direct, for a few moments, the attention 
of the members; to the organs denominated odoriferous glands of 
animals. Bodies of this, or of a homologous character, are possessed 
by nearly all animals, but they are not in all used as a means of 
defence. They give origin to the odour which appears to be more 
or less peculiar to each species of animal, and which probably is in 
some way connected with the sexual instinct. The scent-bag of the 
Moschus moschiferus is the homologue of the glandulz odoriferze 
Tysoni of the human. prepuce; the tegumentary mucous glands of 
mollusea, of annelides, of fishes, the tegumentary glands of reptiles, 
the perspiratory and sebaceous glands of birds, and of mammals, the 
odoriferous glands of insects, the anal sacs of carnivora, &c., are all 
probably of a homologous character. 
Although varying in the degree of their complexity in different 
animals, and in the character of their secretion, yet the essential 
structure is the same throughout. Consistmg of tubes or follicles 
of basement membrane, their complexity depends upon their greater 
or lesser length, their being simple or compound, straight or more or 
less convoluted, and isolated or aggregated, in connection with the 
mode of supplying to them thew nutritive fluid. 
On the interior these cavities or tubes are covered with a single 
layer of nucleolo-nucleated organic cells, the true elaborators or 
manufacturers of the secreted matters of the glandular bodies. 
The secreted matter varies exceedingly in its properties in different 
animals ; in odour being found from that of the perspiratory fluid of 
man, through a great variety of shades, to that most powerful and 
odious of all odours, the secretion of the anal glands of the Mephitis 
Americana ; in consistence from a semi-fluid state to the gaseous 
fluid of the Brachinus crepitans, &c. It is this which constitutes 
