94 
SUPPLEMENT 
The mouth is a longitudinal cleft, which can re-enter or issue 
forth from a rounded cavity. The anus is at the posterior 
extremity of the body. The intestinal canal is usually 
straight and without any great convolution. Nothing is 
found there but sand or mud. The stomach is a sort of giz- 
zard, fleshy and robust. The interior of the body exhibits 
numerous vessels, which doubtless, in the living animal, were 
filled with red blood, like those of the other articulated 
worms. These animals belong either to the East Indies or 
South America. 
We shall include what we have to say respecting Eunice, 
&c. under the head of 
Nereis. Linnaeus was the first naturalist who applied 
this name, derived from that of a family of nymphs of the 
court of Neptune, to a tolerably numerous group of elongated 
and depressed worms, usually composed of a great number of 
rings or segments, provided with tentacular appendages, and 
which are commonly found on all the sea-coasts, concealing 
themselves in the holes or anfractuosities of all the bodies 
which they can find, and penetrating even into the sand and 
mud. This name we find employed even in the first editions 
of the Systema Naturae, At a later period Linnaeus introduced 
under it some species which do not belong to this genus, as 
Pallas demonstrated in his memoir, on the aphroditae ; but the 
latter also, in his turn, united animals to it, which really do 
not appertain to it. Muller was more happy in his work 
upon worms, and in the Prodromus of his Fauna of Den- 
mark ; although he greatly augmented the species of this 
genus, he separated however the fluviatile species, of which 
he made the genus Na'is. Otho Fabricius described a greater 
number of them, and in a manner frequently still more com- 
plete, so that Gmelin, in collecting all that had been done 
upon the subject, has carried the number of the Nereides to 
more than twenty-nine species. From that time until late 
