TOL. VIII.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 'J^ 



necessarily hinder the ascent of the animal ; whereas, if the contrary be true, 

 they serve to keep it up. Each ring has also on the one side only, and that 

 alternately, one small protuberance, much like the middle feet of the body of 

 some caterpillars. — I was not so happy as to discover any motion in any part of 

 them, in water or out of it, nor did they seem, if pricked or otherwise hurt, 

 much (if at all) to contract themselves or shorten the annuli, so that they then 

 appeared to me as things without motion or sense. 



There is another sort of lumbrici lati to be met with very frequently also in 

 dogs, called cucurbitini, from the likeness each annulus or link has to a cucum- 

 ber seed. I have sometimes found them about half a foot long, but more often 

 broken into shorter pieces. The former by us described is undoubtedly a com- 

 plete and entire animal ; but there is great reason of suspicion, that this is a 

 chain of many animals linked together. These animals for kind have been 

 observed to have been voided by men, and found enclosed in a gut or mem- 

 brane of a prodigious length : and a person of great integrity and worth, 

 Mr. T. I. affirmed to me, that he once assisted at the opening of a dog, in 

 which one of the kidneys was observed to be quite wasted, and become a 

 perfect bladder, and in that bladder they found something like an animal of a 

 monstrous shape, which being dissected, was nothing else but a skin full of 

 these lumbrici cucurbitini. 



And because worms of this sort are sometimes said to be found out of the 

 guts, their most proper place, we shall conclude with a very recent obser\^ation 

 of the last month in this city. A surgeon brought me about 20 worms, which 

 he had just then taken out of an ulcerated ancle of a girl of about eight years 

 old. I had the curiosity to go myself and see it. I found the leg sound, all 

 but the ancle, which was vastly swelled, and the girl otherwise hearty and well 

 coloured. She had been in great misery for some months ; had been sent up 

 to London, where she was touched and dressed for the evil. Sometime after 

 her return, her pain continuing, a young puppy was opened and applied to the 

 sores. The surgeon, who took off the puppy, found it full of worms, at least 

 60 in number, taken from the body of the puppy and from the sore ancle to- 

 gether, into which, he said, they crawled down as worms do into the ground. 

 The same puppy was again applied, and it was then that I made the visit, and 

 saw only one worm got into the puppy, but a \-ery live and stirring one. Many 

 were afterwards killed by injections. These worms were of the very species of 

 the lumbrici teretes, which children familiarly void from the guts. They were 

 between 3 and 4 inches long ; all about the matter, of an equal largeness, as of 

 one brood ; something thicker than a duck's qnill ; very sharp at both ends \ 

 stiff and exactly round ; without incisures, visible at least, and yet could move 



