ON THE EOEMATION OE THE EGO IN THE ANNULOSA. 
617 
much reminded me of the sacculated organ, and had all the appearance of being in an 
intermediate condition, 
I am only too well aware that my observations have not yet gone far enough to justify 
any definite conclusions, but they seem to indicate that the eggs of Chelifer* are in 
summer carried about by the animal, that the young ones in this position grow to some 
size, being nourished by a milky fluid secreted for that purpose by a special organ, but 
that, when winter comes on, the eggs are laid by the mother in some secure place, and 
perhaps do not hatch until the warm days of spring. Furthermore, the fact that each 
female Chelifer produces thirty-five to forty eggs in a brood, while the egg-bearing 
specimens have only seventeen or eighteen eggs attached to them, and that while these 
specimens, which I may perhaps be permitted to call “nurses ” (though in a natural, and 
not a Steenstruppian sense), have the absent or at least rudimentary ovary f or testis, 
the ordinary specimens do not possess the peculiar sacculated “ milk-gland,” would seem 
to indicate (though I dare not do more than suggest the possibility) that in Chelifer^ as 
in so many Hymenoptera, vfe have, besides the males and females, certain so-called 
neuter specimens wdiich are (probably in this case also) females with imperfect gene- 
rative organs, and whose function it is less to lay eggs themselves, than to feed and tend 
the young ones produced by the perfect females. 
In September the males of Chelifer seem to be about as numerous as the females ; out 
of the last sixteen specimens which I examined, eight were males, and eight were females. 
The generative organs open at the anterior end of the abdomen. At the orifice is a 
peculiar chitinous body, broader at both ends than in the middle, and provided with 
strong muscles. 
On one side of this body are two large vesicular organs (Plate XVII. fig. 36), each in 
the form of a sphere, with a deep transverse medial constriction. The free half is pale, 
delicate, and apparently empty ; the other has a thicker wall ; it contains about twenty- 
five straight, narrow canals of unequal length, and at the free end of each is a crown or 
flower of glandular bodies, which probably pour their secretion into the straight canal. 
The testis (Plate XVII. fig. 31, a), which probably lies between the sternum and the 
digestive organs, is single, and consists of a median and two lateral tubes, united by three 
transverse branches. It represents, therefore, in miniature that of the Scorpion, differing 
h’om it, however, in that the two testes have coalesced along the middle line. This was, 
at least, the structure of the testis in six males which I dissected ; in the first one, how- 
ever, I thought I found four transverse branches ; but as no second instance of this 
presented itself, the drawing I made at the time may be incorrect. 
The vas deferens {h) is double, and about as long as the testis. I did not ascertain the 
exact relation which they bear to the orifice ; but at the base of the above-mentioned 
chitinous body each of them forms a spherical swelling, and on leaving the testis one of 
them always formed a second elhptic sac. In most of the cases examined by me this 
* The egg-bearing specimen noticed by De Tiieis was found in J une. 
t Or perhaps only a rudiment of one. 
