14 CRUSTACEA. 



The circumscribed heart(l), of an oval form and with muscu- 

 lar parietes, gives origin to six trunks of vessels, three of 

 which are anterior, two inferior, and the sixth posterior. Of 

 the three anterior arteries, the median — the ophthalmic — is 

 distributed almost exclusively to the eyes ; the two others — 

 the antennaries — spread over the shell, the muscles of the sto- 

 mach, a portion of the viscera and the antennae ; the two in- 

 ferior ones — the hepatics — transmit blood to the liver; the 

 last — the sternal — is the most voluminous of the three, and 

 arises from the posterior part of the body, sometimes on the 

 right side and at others on the left; its chief course is to the 

 abdomen, and to the organs of locomotion. It gives origin to 

 a great number of large vessels, among which we should par- 

 ticularly observe the one called by M. Audouin and Edwards 

 the superior ahdominal, because it arises from the posterior 

 part of that artery, at a short distance before the articulation 

 of the thorax with the abdomen, vulgarly termed the tail, and 

 because it soon dips into the abdomen — tail^ — where it divides 

 into two large branches, running backwards, becoming gra- 

 dually smaller and terminating at the anus. The blood which 

 has nourished these various organs, and thus become venous, 

 collects from all quarters in two large sinuses(2), one on each 



(1) These observations are extracted from the excellent Memoir of Messrs 

 Audouin and Edwards, published in the Ann. d'Hist. Nat., t- XI, 283 — 314, and 

 352 — 393. See also the Mem. duMus. d'Hist. Nat., where M. Geoffrot Saint-Ilil- 

 aire has inserted the results of his curious researches on the solids, and on the cir- 

 culation of the Lobster. 



(2) These learned naturalists compare them to the two lateral hearts of the Ce- 

 phalopoda, and the analogy has been admitted by Baron Cuvier in his g-eneral lie- 

 port on the transactions of the Acad. Roy. des Sc, for 1827; but the idea had been 

 communicated by me to M. Audouin, and was a necessary consequence of my 

 theory of the circulation of the blood in the Crustacea, pubhshfid in a note of my 

 Esquisse d'une Distribution Generak du Regne Animal, p. 5. As the writers alluded 

 to have taken no notice of what I have stated in this particular, both in the pam- 

 phlet quoted, and in my work on the " Famihes of the Animal Kingdom," I beg 

 leave to produce that note. " I submit the following opinion to the judgment of 

 Zootomists, and of M. Cuvier in particular, viz. that in those of the Vertebrata 

 possessed of a circulation, the organ called heart represents, in its functions, a 

 left ventricle, the arterial and dorsal trunk of Fishes and of the larvse of the Ba- 

 trachians; that one or two arteries, which in the Cephalopoda have the form of 



