Occasional Notes. 
Prof. Leidy and Parasites. — The following, quoted in 
the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, from the 
Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Science, Phila- 
delphia, 1887, gives some not uninteresting pictures of a 
famous naturalist. " Prof. LEIDY remarked that the habits 
of a naturalist often led him to observe things in our daily 
life which usually escape the notice of others. In our 
food he had frequent occasion to dete6l parasites which 
he preferred to reject, but which are unconsciously 
swallowed by others. While he liked a herring, he 
never ate one without first removing the conspicuously 
coiled worms on the surface of the roes ; and he had 
repeatedly extracted from a piece of black bass or a shad 
a thread-worm which others would not distinguish from 
a vessel or a nerve. While he did not object to the 
little parasitic crab of the oyster, he made it a point to 
remove the equally frequent leech from the clam. It 
was in a piece of ham he was eating that he first noticed 
the trichina, which was no doubt one of the causes that 
led Moses to declare the pig to be unclean ; and in the 
hundred tape-worms he had examined from our fellow- 
citizens during the past twenty-five years he had ascer- 
tained that they had all been derived from rare beef. 
During one of his visits to Charleston, S.C., before the 
late war, at an evening entertainment, among other 
viands were nicely browned slices of the drum-fish, 
Pogonias chromis. A friend informed him that some 
portions were more gelatinous and delicate than others,. 
3B 
