Generation of Entozoa. 103 
an animalcule, or an entozoon. We know not how a mucor 
originates on a decaying vegetable or animal matter, nor how 
millions of animalcules appear in a vegetable infusion, nor 
-how an entozoon shows itself in the intestines or the brain of 
an animal; but because we do not in our present state of 
knowledge understand these things, are we to fall into the er- 
ror of the ancients, and attempt to explain, by what seems 
next to an impossibility, their appearance on the supposition 
of a spontaneous generation? Some of these obscure animals 
have an organization so perfect and admirable, that to me it 
would seem almost as consonant to reason and sense to attri- 
bute the formation and ceconomy of an elephant, or J] might 
say, of man himself, to equivocal generation, as theirs. 
To some, however, there seems to be no difficulty in the 
matter; and it is stated with great confidence, that because a 
clot of effused lymph from an inflamed serous surface becomes 
organized and sensible, so it is quite easy to conceive that a 
living worm may be equally produced from unorganized mat- 
ter; the only difference between the two being this,—that the 
organized lymph continues adherent to the matrix, while the 
other is cast off as a separate being. 
But that the analogy between an orgazined portion of lymph 
and an entozoon is extremely remote, can, I think, be easily 
shown ; there is, indeed, a gap between them which can never 
be filled up. In the first place, the effused lymph in the ex- 
ample alluded to, however organized it may be, is a constituent, 
though I grant an unnecessary and superfluous part, of the 
body to which it is attached; but it is a natural product of 
that law of the animal ceconomy, by which it throws out lymph 
from inflamed serous membranes,.and fromthe sides of wounds, 
into which the vessels pullulate for the purpose of uniting the 
dissevered or adjacent surfaces. It is, in fact, a product of 
the adhesive action, or adhesive inflammation, as the common 
term is, and has no life whatever independently of the life of 
the part on which it is situated. However extraneous or un- 
necessary to the animal which has produced it, it has no vi- 
tality independent of the life of that animal of which it is now 
an integrant part, and its separation from which is its imme- 
diate death. 
Again, I would remark, that no growth from effused lymph 
is ever seen showing any mark of independent life, or in the 
state of passing from a dependent to an independent vitality. 
No instance has ever occurred of effused lymph, however or- 
ganized it may have become, exhibiting, as in the postic 
fictions of the animals formed from the mud of the Nile, one 
part as merely organized lymph, and another assuming the 
