OlV ANNELIDA. 
39 
tortoises from their shell with a mattock, in the same manner 
as they remove the worms from plants which are infested by 
them. 
Finally, the word Elmins , which is frequently employed by 
Hippocrates in many of his works, and among others, in his 
General Treatise on Diseases, was applied by him to those 
animals which are at present known under the denomination 
of intestinal worms , of which he w r as acquainted with but a 
small number of species. Aristotle has employed it in the 
same manner, as well as iElian, every time that he speaks of 
the substances which are used to rid dogs of the worms, to 
which they are subject. 
The Latin authors, and Pliny among the rest, appear to 
have restricted the word lumbricus to the intestinal worms, 
and to have rendered the three Greek denominations by a 
single one, that of vermes , from which it has happened that 
the modems have been led to the same confusion, by the 
word worms , which, as well as the French word vers, is evi- 
dently derived from the Latin. All the other animals, which 
they comprehended under the name of exsangnia , meaning by 
that term that they had not red blood, were divided under the 
three titles of insecta , mollusca , and zoophyta . The term 
vermes did not then possess that undue extension which it 
obtained among the naturalists of the last century, with whom 
it at last comprehended all animals, with the exception of the 
vertebrata, the insects and the Crustacea. This extension was 
probably owing to the having united in the definition of the 
word the consideration of the softness of the body to that of 
its elongated form. To Linnaeus unquestionably is attribut- 
able this unlucky innovation ; for, previously to his time, we 
find that Isidore, of Seville, though he has employed the name 
of vermes for a sort of class, has only included under it such 
animals as might with some propriety be so called : in fact 
