Generation of Entozoa. 



103 



an animalcule, or an entozoon. We know not how a mucor 

 originates on a decaying vegetable or animal matter, nor how 

 millions of animalcules appear in a vegetable infusion, nor 

 how an entozoon shows itself in the intestines or the brain of 

 an animal; but because we do not in our present state of 

 knowledge understand these things, are we to fall into the er- 

 ror of the ancients, and attempt to explain, by what seems 

 next to an impossibility, their appearance on the supposition 

 of a spontaneous generation ? Some of these obscure animals 

 have an organization so perfect and admirable, that to me it 

 would seem almost as consonant to reason and sense to attri- 

 bute the formation and ceconomy of an elephant, or I might 

 say, of man himself, to equivocal generation, as theirs. 



To some, however, there seems to be no difficulty in the 

 matter ; and it is stated with great confidence, that because a 

 clot of effused lymph from an inflamed serous surface becomes 

 organized and sensible, so it is quite easy to conceive that a 

 living worm may be equally produced from unorganized mat- 

 ter ; the only difference between the two being this, — that the 

 organized lymph continues adherent to the matrix, while the 

 other is cast off as a separate being. 



But that the analogy between an orgazined portion of lymph 

 and an entozoon is extremely remote, can, I think, be easily 

 shown ; there is, indeed, a gap between them which can never 

 be filled up. In the first place, the effused lymph in the ex- 

 ample alluded to, however organized it maybe, is a constituent, 

 though I grant an unnecessary and superfluous part, of the 

 body to which it is attached ; but it is a natural product of 

 that law of the animal ceconomy, by which it throws out lymph 

 from inflamed serous membranes, and from the sides of wounds, 

 into which the vessels pullulate for the purpose of uniting the 

 dissevered or adjacent surfaces. It is, in fact, a product of 

 the adhesive action, or adhesive inflammation, as the common 

 term is, and has no life whatever independently of the life of 

 the part on which it is situated. However extraneous or un- 

 necessary to the animal which has produced it, it has no vi- 

 tality independent of the life of that animal of which it is now 

 an integrant part, and its separation from which is its imme- 

 diate death. 



Again, I would remark, that no growth from effused lymph 

 is ever seen showing any mark of independent life, or in the 

 state of passing from a dependent to an independent vitality. 

 No instance has ever occurred of effused lymph, however or- 

 ganized it may have become, exhibiting, as in the postic 

 fictions of the animals formed from the mud of the Nile, one 

 part as merely organized lymph, and another assuming the 



