(J02 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 1683. 



must needs greatly promote its progressive motion, since, being of so great a 

 length, it could make but small advance, which is perhaps requisite, that it 

 might recover itself, when the descent of the faeces drive it downwards. 

 And for the advancing too of its motion, at every joint there is a prominence 

 of the former over the latter, which like so many scales on the belly of other 

 reptiles do perform the use of feet. 



But I find that those who admit this worm to be alive, have several of them 

 very different thoughts of it; and many assert that it is not one, but many 

 worms linked together. Gabucinus denies the lumbricus latus, i. e. that spolium 

 of the intestines, as he calls it, to be an animal ; but that it receives all its sense 

 and motion, from those cucurbitini included in it. This he very plainly, as 

 he tells us, discovered in a part of this worm, showed him by a person that 

 voided it. In that I met with in a dog in the college theatre, whilst alive, and 

 in my hand, a joint or two fell off, but I could no ways observe any membrane 

 hanging to the foregoing joint, out of which it might slip, but it broke off 

 entire. And although there were 2 single joints, which I found in the intes- 

 tine, on the first opening it, yet there was nothing I could see affixed to the 

 last, which might include them. And indeed the setting on of the joints here 

 is such, that seems to me sufficiently to show, that this worm cannot be a con- 

 tinued membrane, articulated only by the several cucurbitini included in it, 

 since there is so large a protuberance of the lower extremity of the foregoing 

 joint, over the upper part of the following, which I plainly perceived in this 

 worm. If only a membrane, why constantly and thus regularly a difference of 

 both extremes, as to their length and breadth? How happen the hooks at the 

 head? How are those orifices formed at the edges, or on the flat of the 

 worm? And if it was so, as Gabucinus imagined, I cannot think but I must 

 have perceived something of it in those several pieces of this worm, which I 

 have observed, and especially in that 8 yards long, where I opened several 

 joints, and could find no such thing. That mucous matter therefore, which is 

 observed to be voided by those troubled with them, which he tells us the women 

 there take for the beds of this worm, may be better accounted for; it being 

 likely in a great measure to be but the mucus of the intestines themselves, or a 

 slimy spolium cast off from these worms. Thus leeches I have observed being 

 put into water cast out a slime, which covers their bodies, which afterwards 

 they slip off and is found in the bottom of the glass in the form of a mucous 

 coat. So earth-worms void a large quantity of a mucous liquor at several 

 parts of their body; so snails, &c. of which more in my anatomy of those ani- 

 mals. Upon the whole, I see no reason why we may not justly ascribe that life 

 we find here to the lumbricus latus itself, and not to any animals we may fancy 

 it pregnant with. And what I give to the whole, I must attribute likewise 

 to the several parts of it, even when separated from the rest of the body; and 



