392 



ORIGIX OF HELICOID STRIAE 



The wall of the intestine, while not very thick, is somewhat irregular in 

 thickness, the lumen appearing zigzag. At places the wall of the intestine 

 is one-fourth as thick as the intestine is wide; at other places nearby its 

 thickness may diminish by two- thirds. There is a distinct lining to the 

 intestine, apparently made up of "columnar" elements vertical to the inner 

 surface, though these have not been very clearly seen (Fig. 8). The granules 

 contained in the intestinal cells are rather uniform in size, but their histo- 

 logical characters can not be made out on account of the state of preservation 

 of the specimen. Well forward, near the blind end of the ovary, the intestine 

 is not over one-third as wide as the body; and in this region the body wall, 

 including the cuticle, occupies about one-fourth the radius, of which amount 

 the vaguely retrorse cuticle occupies eight microns and the muscular tissue 

 fifteen microns. There seems to be a very short rectum. The portion of 

 the intestine just in front of the rectum is saccate, and, for a very short dis- 

 tance about half as wide as the corresponding part of the body; whereas 

 in front of this enlargement the intestine is only about one-third as wide as 

 the body. 



Fig. 6 



Fig. 7 



Fig. 6. Should two ordinary adjacent annules on each side of the nema behave as 

 shown in 1, the result would be four helices; four such would originate eight helices. 

 See also Fig. 7 and Fig. 5. 



Fig. 7. Should anastomosing take place simultaneously in successive annules oppo- 

 site any four of the longitudinal chords a, b, c and d, say the four submedian, or the 

 two lateral and the two median, the result would be four helicoid striae. See also 

 Fig. 6. 



The blind end of the anterior ovary, about as wide as the distance between 

 two of the adjacent oblique winds of the cuticular helix, is about two-thirds 

 as far behind the cardia as this latter is behind the anterior extremity. In 

 this region, in the body cavity, which is relatively of considerable capacity, 

 there are "floating" organs made up of ellipsoidal or subspherical, fine granules, 

 the largest of which are about eight microns in diameter (Fig. 8, org fluit). 

 These "loose" organs are reminiscent of those known and figured in some of 

 the ascarids, e.g., Ascaris kukenthalii. The ovaries lie in elongate coils, 

 and at first contain oocytes about four microns across, which soon increase 

 and become packed in the ovaries in the form of polyhedrons whose optical con- 

 tour is often hexagonal, and which are 10 to 12 microns across where the ovary 

 is one-third as wide as the body. The stretched-out ovary would be about 



