42 THE TAPE-WORM. 



Blumenbach stood almost alone among the later naturalists, 

 when, to the astonishment of his contemporaries, he defended 

 the incorrect views of Vallisnieri. 1 The older inquirers were 

 quite right in regarding the varjpus isolated Tama-joiuts as sepa- 

 rate individuals, though they certainly fell into a gross error in 

 imagining that the long, many-jointed Tania was composed of 

 coalesced Vermes cucurbitini] in point of fact it is exactly the 

 reverse, the Vermes cucurbitini owing their origin, to the break- 

 ing up of the Tcenia into separate joints. That the first impres- 

 sion of these old naturalists was a just one is evident, from the 

 circumstance that even modern helminthologists, meeting now 

 and then with solitary Tcenia- joints, with whose origin they were 

 unacquainted, have regarded them as peculiar individual worms, 

 and described them accordingly. A remarkable intestinal worm 

 described many years ago by Diesing, under the name of Thy- 

 sanosoma actinoides, which was found in the intestine of a species 

 of deer from Brazil, created much sensation amongst helmin- 

 thologists, until Diesing himself, not long ago, acknowledged 

 it to be an isolated joint or Proglottis of Tcenia fimbriata? 

 Dujardin described the isolated joints of various Cestoidea as 

 forms of a peculiar genus of worms, to which he gave the name 

 of Proglottis? Although he believed them to be originally 

 derived from Taenia, he was, notwithstanding, so firmly convinced 

 of their independent existence, that he made them into a sepa- 

 rate genus in his systematic arrangement of the Cestoidea. 41 

 However, since more has been known of the alternation of gene- 

 rations, whereby the origin of one animal from another of quite 

 dissimilar form, and their mutual relations to each other have 

 been explained and familiarized, helminthologists generally admit 

 that a cestoid worm is really a colony of animals. How dif- 

 ficult naturalists formerly found it, to accede to a view that 

 since the time of Blumenbach had been a subject of ridicule, 



1 ' Gottingischen Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen,' 1774, No. 154. Blumenbach 

 regards the anterior, smallest, joints of a tape-worm as the oldest, and he accounts for 

 their being smaller than the posterior joints by supposing that they have to give up the 

 nutriment which they take in, to their successors which have fastened on to them behind. 

 He compares these worms to the mass of authors, the more modern of whom merely 

 suck out of their immediate predecessors, that which these had extracted in the same 

 way from still older writers. 



a See his ' Systema Helminthnm,' i, 1850, p. 501. 



3 ' Annales des Sciences Naturelles,' t. xx, 1843, p. 341. 



4 ' Histoire Naturelle des Helminthes,' 1845, p. 630, pi. 10, figs. A, n, c. 



