F. W. Flattely 
279 
of (a) burst practically without exception. In the case of (b) the eggs remaining 
apparently intact were slightly more numerous. Very strikingly different was 
the case of the eggs kept in water: these seemed to have increased slightly in 
size, were perfectly regular in shape, their envelope intact and, in short, 
appeared all ready for development except that there was no movement to 
be detected within the egg. Judging by appearances, therefore, the viability 
of the egg seems to be distinctly favoured by the presence of water. This con¬ 
clusion is not new of course (see Ministry of Agriculture Leaflet, No. 119), but 
it is interesting to have obtained experimental evidence in a matter which is 
of considerable practical importance. It does not necessarily follow from this 
that the presence of water is essential to the life-history (although it may be 
so); if the intermediate host should be a member of the dung fauna then the 
eggs will either be ingested within a comparatively short period (say a week), 
or will have lost their opportunity definitively, in which case their subsequent 
viability is not of much moment. 
A considerable number of worms were collected from the Aberdeen abattoirs 
at various times and proved to be M. expansa without exception. 
OBSERVATIONS ON MONIEZIA IN THE NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE AREA. 
Through the courtesy of Prof. Gilchrist and the members of the Northum¬ 
berland Education Committee, I was able to carry out a feeding experiment 
to test the possibility of a sheep acting both as intermediate and as final host 
to the worm. I thought it possible that by feeding eggs to a ewe, larval stages 
(hexacanths, cysticercoids or what not) might be recovered later from the 
tissues, notably the udder region. If this should prove to be the case then it 
would not be difficult to round off the life-cycle by supposing the embryo to 
remain dormant in the udder region of the ewe until it had dropped its 
lambs, when the embryos would be passed to the offspring when sucking. The 
arguments for and against such a theory were discussed earlier in this paper. 
The feeding experiment was actually performed upon a Sussex half-bred ewe- 
lamb only a week old. It would have been more logical to select an older sheep 
but this was not found practicable; moreover, by selecting a newly-born lamb 
the experiment would serve at the same time to demonstrate the possibility 
or not of direct infection. Again, it seems not unlikely that a lamb would 
pick up eggs from the pastures at an early date under natural conditions, 
though possibly not until after it had begun to graze in earnest. 
A quantity of eggs were isolated from ripe proglottids and administered 
in 50 c.c. of water to the lamb on Thursday, April 14th, 1921, with the aid of 
a small syringe, being squirted over the tongue and sides of the mouth. Care 
was taken to use eggs from as many different individual tapeworms as possible 
and from proglottids which had all the appearance of being properly mature. 
The dose was repeated a fortnight later. After being dosed, the lamb was put 
back with the mother-ewe and allowed the same liberty as the rest of the flock. 
No control lamb was used and the fact that the experimental lamb was 
