278 PARASITES OF MAN* 



of the rinderpest, all sorts of erroneous notions took possession 

 of the popular mind, and the errors were stimulated by writers 

 ignorant of helminthology. In January, 1866, I published a 

 few observations, the purport of which was to show that certain 

 microscopic organisms found in animals dying from cattle 

 plague were harmless " parasitic Protozoa," possessing more or 

 less striking vegetable affinities. About a week previously 

 some interesting researches on these so-called cattle-plague 

 bodies had been published by Dr Beale. Those who first saw 

 these bodies thought they had stumbled upon organisms new to 

 science. I showed that similar or analogous organisms were 

 to be met with in a great variety of animals, and likewise in 

 the human body. They had been called worm-nodules, worm- 

 nests, egg-sacs, eggs of the common fluke, young " measles/' 

 corpuscles produced by muscular degeneration, psorospermiae, 

 stages of growth of gregarinse, amoeboid bodies, and so forth. 

 In so far as the higher animals were concerned, Dujardin was 

 the first to describe them. He found these organisms in a 

 mole. This animal, however, having been fed upon earth- 

 worms known to harbour such parasites, there was no difficulty 

 in accounting for the source of the psorosperms. 



In 1853 Hessling discovered psorospermial sacs in the mus- 

 cular substance of the heart, not only of the ox, but also of the 

 sheep and roe. By him they were regarded as evidences of 

 muscular degeneration. About ten years previously Miescher 

 found similar bodies in the muscles of the mouse. 



In 1857 Rainey described similar structures taken from the 

 flesh of swine ; and, in his memoir, he went so far as to main- 

 tain that these bodies were early stages of development of the 

 common pork-measle. In the year 1858 Gubler wrote an 

 important paper on this subject, in which he related a case 

 where twenty cysts existed in the human liver. The cysts 

 were of great size, mostly as large as a hen's egg, one of them 

 being some six inches in diameter. Naturally, the largest had 

 been diagnosed as an ordinary hydatid. However, on evacuat- 

 ing their contents (post mortem), they were found to harbor 

 enormous quantities of minute corpuscles strictly analogous to 

 those usually obtained from psorospermial sacs. Gubler believed 

 he had stumbled upon masses of eggs of Distoma hepaticum, but 

 in this he erred. Shortly after Gubler's discovery similar 

 bodies from the human liver were described by Virchow ; and 

 in 1862, the subject was followed up by Dr Dressier, of Prague. 



