TAENIA SOLIUM. 231 



prove dangerous to the life of his friends and neighbours, and espe- 

 cially also to members of the same household. A case of this kind has 

 come to my knowledge, and it may be explained as follows : — One 

 or more free proglottides or joints with their eggs had escaped 

 from the bowel, either at night voluntarily on their part, or during 

 the day passively, in some such way, at all events, as secured the 

 liberation of scores, possibly thousands, of ova. One of these 

 escaped eggs had somehow or other come in contact with human 

 food, or possibly had been blown into the mouth, or even, per- 

 haps, had been carried on the legs of some fly into the milk or 

 sugar on the table ; in some such manner, at least, the egg found 

 its way to the -stomach, and from thence it got into the circulation, 

 ultimately making its passage to the brain, where its presence gave 

 rise to convulsions and death. I offer this as a probable explana- 

 tion in the case of a young woman whose sister suffered from 

 tapeworm, but I need not say that out of the sixty or seventy deaths 

 recorded from the ascertained presence of this " worm in the 

 brain" it is more than likely that a similar train of reasoning would 

 afford a true solution of the so-called mystery as to how these 

 entozoa become our brain-guests. Yery frequently we entertain 

 the same larvae as guests within our muscles and beneath the skin ; 

 but, after all, the Gysticerci or larvae of our Tcenia solium are rare 

 visitants to the human territory when compared with the larvae of 

 another kind of tapeworm which destroys hundreds of the human 

 species annually. Of this and several other visitants, non-celestial, 

 in the sense of their being neither few nor far between, I shall speak 

 more fully under the head of Tcenia ecMnococcus ; but before con- 

 cluding this part of my subject I may allude to what appears to me 

 to be the most remarkable case of development of Gysticerci within 

 the human body on record. It is that recently recorded by Delore 

 in the " Gazette Medical de Paris." In a man, aged seventy- seven, 

 who died from pulmonary catarrh, old age, and fractured cervix 

 femoris, there were two thousand Gysticerci found post mortem. 

 Of these, one hundred, and eleven occurred in connection with the 



