244 ANIMAL PARASITES AND MESSMATES. 



These trichina of the muscles can be discerned by the 

 naked eye. But before we enter on a particular descrip- 

 tion (and they are now known in their minutest details), 

 let us notice what were the circumstances which led to 

 their attracting so much attention. 



It was in 1832; a demonstrator of a course of 

 anatomy at Guy's Hospital in London, Mr. J. Hilton, 

 found in the flesh of a man sixty-six years of age, who 

 died of a cancer, a great number of little white bodies 

 which he took for vesicular worms. The scalpel, during 

 the dissection of the muscles, met with granulations 

 which blunted the edge of the instrument. Astonished 

 to find in the flesh hard corpuscules which the instru- 

 ment divided with difficulty, he removed some of them, 

 examined them attentively, but, no doubt, he was not 

 sufficiently acquainted with helminthology to understand 

 their true nature, He referred to Professor E. Owen, 

 the celebrated naturalist of the British Museum, who 

 recognized them as new worms, and gave them the 

 name of Trichina, because they are as thin as a hair ; 

 he added the specific name of spiralis on account of the 

 manner in which they were rolled up in their cyst. 

 Trichina spiralis is therefore the name of this animal. 



Some naturalists, at that time, believed that the 

 filaments of the fecundating fluid of the male were 

 parasitical worms, such as are found in other liquids; 

 and these filaments which were designated by the name of 

 spermatozoiids (the animalculse o$ the older naturalists), 

 were considered as beings havi^ a certain affinity with 

 trichinae. The trichina were the intermediate state 

 between these filaments of the fecundating fluid and 

 worms properly so called. It is now known with 



