VOL. XIV.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 37 



had no animals in it ; but the substance upon and between his teeth, had a 

 great many living creatures swimming nimbler than I had hitherto seen. The 

 largest sort were numerous, and as they moved bent themselves. The other 

 sorts of animals were in great numbers, insomuch that though the meal were 

 little, yet the water it was mixed with seemed to be all alive : there were also 

 the long threads above-mentioned. The spittle of another old man, a toper, 

 was like the former, but the animals in the scurf on the teeth were not all 

 killed by his continual taking brandy, wine, and tobacco; for I found a few 

 living animals of the 3d sort, and in the scurf between the teeth I found many 

 more small animals of the two smaller sorts. 



I took in my mouth some very strong wine-vinegar; then closing my teeth, 

 I gargled and rinsed them very well with the vinegar; and afterwards I washed 

 them very well with fair water; but there were innumerable quantities of ani- 

 mals still remaining in the scurf on the teeth, but most in that between the 

 teeth, and very few animals of the first sort. I took a very little wine-vinegar, 

 and mixed it with the water in which the scurf was dissolved; upon which the 

 animals died presently. From hence I conclude, that the vinegar with which I 

 washed my teeth, killed only those animals which were on the outside of the 

 scurf, but did not pass through the whole substance of it. 



The number of these animals in the scurf of a man's teeth are so many, that 

 I believe they exceed the number of men in a kingdom. For on the examina- 

 tion of a small parcel of it, no thicker than a horse-hair, I found so many living 

 animals in it, that I guess there might have been 1000 in a quantity of matter 

 no larger than the -pLg- part of a sand. 



A certain man being said to have worms taken out of his face, I took a 

 quantity of these imagined worms, which I laid upon a clean glass, that I might 

 view them at my leisure. I found them not to differ from what I gave an ac- 

 count of in my letter of the 4 th of November, l681 ; unless it were that some 

 of the hairs in these supposed worms were so tender, that they broke in two on 

 the least touch. Other worms seemed to be a bundle of hairs, but when I went 

 to separate them, it was just as if I had touched a soft fat body. I squeezed 

 some black specks out of the thick of my own nose, which I saw to be bundles 

 of hairs, I then took out hairs from one of them to the number of 36. I took 

 the worms out of the noses of 2 other persons, and I found the number of hairs 

 in a bundle, to be from 3, 4, 5, 6, and 9 to 25, and 30. When the worms lay 

 deepest in the nose, they seldom contained any hairs, unless the person they 

 came from were very black, and then the hairs were more easily perceivable. In 

 the pressing out of worms, I could tell whether there were hairs in them or not; 



