VOL. XLV.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. fill 



then fall off irregularly to one side, as if not yet fitted for progressive motion, 

 languidly turn their extremities, and then again lie quiet for some little time. 

 It was his fortune however, not in this infusion only, but in many others, to 

 find some of these chaplet-like animals much smaller indeed than those of the 

 wheat infusion; but quite regular, constant in their vermicular motion, and 

 which were consequently arrived to a higher degree of maturity and perfection. 

 He owned he could not but wonder to this day at what he saw; and though he 

 had now seen them so often, he still looked upon them with new surprize. Yet 

 had these phenomena served him to very good purpose, and cleared up many 

 difficulties in his former observations. 



The origin of blight in wheat, rye, and other vegetables, was no longer mys- 

 terious: an atmosphere charged to an extraordinary degree with humidity, now 

 plainly appeared sufficient, particularly while the grains were tender and replete 

 with a milky juice in a certain degree of exaltation, to produce in them this new 

 kind of vegetation, and to form their interior substance into filaments, which are 

 indeed those very eels he had observed some years before in blighted wheat. 



This agrees perfectly with another observation made by the gentleman who 

 translated his little Essay into French : some of this blighted wheat, 1 years after 

 he had gathered it, he had given to Mr. Trembley, and he to this gentleman. 

 In a note he has added, he observes, that these filaments not only recovered life 

 and motion, after they had been so long dry, by macerating them in water ; 

 but many broke, and discharged from within them globules, which moved with 

 extreme vivacity. The application of the foregoing observations to this case is 

 easy and natural ; nor is it now any wonder, that these filaments, the vegetative 

 force still residing within them, should move and resolve into globules, or that 

 they should have subsisted so long, full of that kind of lite they are actuated 

 with, though dry and without nourishment; for now they cease to be eels, as he 

 formerly thought them. 



Blighted rye, which is also so full of filaments of this nature, that the grains 

 are swelled in their diameters, and extended to an extraordinary length by this 

 new kind of vegetation, exhibited nearly the same phenomena when macerated, 

 and is to be classed accordinglv. He was told by some of the gentlemen of the 

 Royal Academy of Sciences here, that in those provinces of France, where this 

 blighted rye abounds, and is made up into bread, it produces very strange efl^ects 

 in the poor country people who feed on it, many of which are here found in the 

 hospitals afflicted with a very singular kind of mortification, which causes their 

 limbs to drop oft*. 



There are 2 sorts of blight, in one of which the grain crumbles into a black 

 powder ; and the other is that which gives these moving filaments or eels. Mr. 



4 I 1 



