628 
CORPUSCLES OP THE BLOOD. 
several families of this or that order may be thus diagnosed ; 
of which he gives a remarkable and curious proof in the 
blood of Moschus. When this was submitted to his examina- 
tion by Professor Flower, Mr. Gulliver at once pronounced 
that, though the corpuscles had the ruminant character, they 
could not belong to an animal of the same genus or family as 
the old Moschus (now Tragulus ), and his figures show the 
differences in point. He confirms the rule, long since disco- 
vered by him, that there is a relation, cateris paribus , be- 
tween the size of the red corpuscles and that of the species 
of animal in a single family of Mammals; though there is no 
such relation, as Hewson had shown, in species of different 
orders, — the Mouse and Horse, e.g. As to the comparative 
smallness of the red corpuscles in the smaller species of a 
family of Mammals or the class of Birds, he concludes that 
it is a provision for an increase of the sum of the surface of 
the blood-discs, as carriers of oxygen in the service of respi- 
ration and the production of animal heat, since the aggregate 
surface of a given bulk of them will be multiplied by their 
minuteness, and thus the comparatively greater loss of heat 
by the smaller animals will be compensated, as more fully 
explained in the report of his Lecture IX, in the Medical 
Times and Gazette, January 17, 1863, and in another of his 
lectures abstracted in Scientific Opinion , December 8, 1869* 
The doctrine that the size of the red corpuscles has relation 
to the food of the animal — that the corpuscles are largest in 
the omnivorous species — he utterly rejects, because, among 
other reasons, the corpuscles are not larger in the omnivorous 
pig than in the phytivorous rhinoceros, tapir, and ass, and 
are as large in the carnivorous Ursine Dasyure as in the 
omnivorous Perameles. The whole memoir abounds in the 
results of Professor Gulliver's researches on the sizes of the 
red corpuscles of the blood, and affords remarkable proof of 
the value of microscopical observations in systematic zoology. 
The comparative descriptions and figures in this respect are 
both interesting and new as regards Tragulus, Moschus, and 
Oryderopus ; and when Professor Flower has completed his 
long-expected report on the anatomy of Moschus moschiferus , 
we shall know the true position in the zoological scale of 
this rare animal. At all events, Professor Gulliver's obser- 
vations have triumphantly proved the importance and signi- 
ficance of size, both in a zoological and physiological point of 
view, as determined by very numerous and careful microme- 
trical measurements of the red corpuscles of the blood 
throughout the vertebrate sub-kingdom. 
