50 



in the systematic works of the day. Dr, Cobbold, from whose 

 work on parasites this brief history was taken, has made some 

 observations on this worm. In 1879, Lord Walsingham, of Eng- 

 land, offered a prize of two hundred and lift}' dollars, to be 

 awarded by the Council of the Entomological Society of Lon- 

 don, for the best essay, comprising a complete life history of the 

 parasite causing the gapes. Mr. Charles Black and Dr. Pierre 

 Megnin, a well-known French scientist, competed for the prize. 

 The latter received the award. The conclusions at which he ar- 

 rived in regard to the propagation of the disease, are as follows : 

 First, that birds pick up mature Syngami filled with eggs, which 

 are coughed out by those having the disease, or the eggs are 

 taken in their food, or the embryos after they are hatched in 

 water, and they are developed within them to the perfect form. 

 Second, that no intermediate host, as perfect insects, larvae,, 

 mollusks, or any other living agent, has any share in spreading 

 the disease. In a supplement to the above, written about twenty 

 months after, he says : " In the preceding memoir, we pointed 

 out that the eggs ejected during the coughing fits hatch in water, 

 and that the embryos, resembling an anguillula, may live in this 

 medium for many months, because we have kept some alive al- 

 most a year, in a low temperature. The birds are infected by 

 drinking the water containing these embryos." 



This, then, is the conclusion at which Dr. Megnin arrives, after 

 five or six years of study of the gapes in the various pheasant- 

 ries of Central France, and around Paris Dr. Cobbold says, in 

 his work on "Parasites," page 445: "A change of hosts is prob- 

 ably necessary, but in the first instance they either enter the sub- 

 stance of fungi or other vegetable matters, or they bury them- 

 selves in the soil a short distance from the surface." In Lord 

 Walsingham's preface to the essay by Dr. Megnin, he says: " By 

 Dr. Megnin's permission, his memoir is now published in a sep- 

 arate form, the subject of it being one which could not rightly 

 be included amongst the publications of the Entomological So- 

 ciety, although at the time of offering the prize I was led, by 

 information gathered from various sources, to think it possible. 



