THE COASTS OP SAI^TONGE. 281 



characters ought of themselves to have raised some 

 doubts on this head. Like the leech, the Branchel- 

 lion is furnished at each of its extremities with a 

 sucker, which enables it to affix itself securely, but 

 the body, instead of being in a single piece, as is the 

 case in all the animals to which it approximates, 

 bears on its anterior extremity a kind of rounded 

 enlarged and spindle-shaped neck, which is very 

 nearly one- third of the whole length, whilst the rest 

 of the animal, which resembles a dark violet coloured 

 leech, presents on each side a series of thin lamina) 

 widened in a fan-like shape, plaited on the edges, 

 and of a lighter colour. By this division of the body 

 into two very distinct portions, and by the existence 

 of these appendages the Branchellion formed a soli- 

 tary exception in the group of the Hirudinere *, and 

 by placing it in the same family, and side by side 

 with the ordinary leech, De Blainville acted in direct 



to a close before his life was half spent, and although he was never 

 able to publish the greater part of the materials which he had 

 collected, he must still rank in the number of the founders of 

 modern science. Cuvier has gracefully characterised his labours in 

 a single sentence : " Savigny ne decouvre pas, il revele," words 

 which aptly express the unexpected nature of many of the results 

 discovered by this naturalist After an interval of twenty years we 

 can fully confirm this judgment. The memoirs of Savigny on the 

 Annelids, on simple and compound Ascidians, on the structure of 

 the mouth of Insects, &c., are still the standard works on the 

 subjects of which they treat, and indicate that their author 

 possessed in an extraordinary degree a combination of those two 

 rare properties, great power of observation and a spirit of generali- 

 sation which was at once bold and vigorous (see the Eloge de 

 Savigny, by M. J. Geoffroy Saint- Hilaire). 



* The name of the family, in which are included all worms that 

 are allied to the leeches. 



