94? SUPPLEMENT 



The mouth is a longitudinal cleft, which can re-enter or issue 

 forth from a rounded cavity. The anus is at the posterior 

 extremity of the body. The intestinal canal is usually 

 straight and without any great convolution. Nothing is 

 found there but sand or mud. The stomach is a sort of giz- 

 zard, fleshy and robust. The interior of the body exhibits 

 numerous vessels, which doubtless, in the living animal, were 

 filled with red blood, like those of the other articulated 

 worms. These animals belong either to the East Indies or 

 South America. 



We shall include what we have to say respecting Eunice, 

 &c. under the head of 



Nereis. Linnaeus was the first naturalist who applied 

 this name, derived from that of a family of nymphs of the 

 court of Neptune, to a tolerably numerous group of elongated 

 and depressed worms, usually composed of a great number of 

 rings or segments, provided with tentacular appendages, and 

 which are commonly found on all the sea-coasts, concealing 

 themselves in the holes or anfractuosities of all the bodies 

 which they can find, and penetrating even into the sand and 

 mud. This name we find employed even in the first editions 

 of the Systema Nature. At a later period Linnaeus introduced 

 under it some species which do not belong to this genus, as 

 Pallas demonstrated in his memoir, on the aphroditse ; but the 

 latter also, in his turn, united animals to it, which really do 

 not appertain to it. Muller was more happy in his work 

 upon worms, and in the Prodromus of his Fauna of Den- 

 mark ; although he greatly augmented the species of this 

 genus, he separated however the fluviatile species, of which 

 he made the genus Nais. Otho Fabricius described a greater 

 number of them, and in a manner frequently still more com- 

 plete, so that Gmelin, in collecting all that had been done 

 upon the subject, has carried the number of the Nereides to 

 more than twenty -nine species. From that time until late 



