360 



PEOF. T. S. COBBOLD ON THE 



Nematodes. Two years subsequently, the dried clots being 

 softened in water, were still found to contain the. worms tolerably 

 well preserved. Prom the date of the publication of Eobin's 

 ' Lectures,' Dr. Foncervines's ' find ' could not, I presume, have 

 been made later than 1872. Not improbably it occurred at an 

 earlier date. M. Bobin gives a figure of one of the worms. The 

 length and thickness of it do not materially differ from the 

 measurements of the Gruadeloupe worm as given by Dr. Corre. 

 I hold that the slight discrepancies which do exist in respect of 

 size are of little or no moment. Stages of growth are alone 

 sufficient to account for some of them. The presence of an outer 

 skin, which some have spoken of as a cyst, cannot be held either 

 to settle or even to influence the question of specific identity. 

 The outer envelope, so far from its being in any sense comparable 

 to an adventitious cyst or " sheath," as Lew^is calls it, actually 

 represents the original embryo-skin separating by ecdysis. Its 

 nature ought to have been recognized from the very first ; but 

 Lewis appears to have thought that the presence of " delicate, 

 translucent sheaths" indicated a material departure from the 

 appearances commonly presented by "the young of many other 

 Nematodes." 



Early in the month of July 1872 Dr. Lew is made his interesting 

 discovery of Nematode Hsematozoa in the blood of an Indian 

 native suff'ering from diarrhoea ; and in the month of October of 

 the same year he detected microscopic Filarice in the blood of 

 one of the patients in whose urine he had detected similar w^orms 

 more than two years previously. This is the case I have pre- 

 viously quoted. Without repeating any details, it suffices to 

 remark that the urinary parasites and the Hsematozoa were 

 identical. Dr. Lewis, recognizing the importance of his dis- 

 covery, named the larval parasite Filar ia sanguinis Jiominis (Eef. 

 No. 9). Of course it was not possible for Lewis to declare that 

 his embryonal nematoids must belong to the genus Filaria, since 

 the embryos of other nematode genera very closely resemble 

 these microscopic hsematozoa. However, the proposed nomen- 

 clature, so far as the genus was concerned, turned out to be a 

 ' lucky hit.' 



The subsequently discovered parent worm may fairly be re- 

 legated to the genus in which Lewis thus happily placed it. We 

 now know, or at least are fully persuaded, that the larval worms 

 first discovered by Wucherer are identical with those separately 



