106 
ON THE BLOOD-LIKE PHENOMENA. 
ARTICLE IX. 
OBSERVATIONS ON THE BLOOD-LIKE PHENOMENA, OBSERVED 
IN EGYPT, ARABIA, AND SIBERIA, 
WITH A VIEW AND CRITIQUE OF THE EARLY ACCOUNTS OF SIMILAR APPEARANCES, 
BY MR. C G. EHRENBERG. 
Extracted from Jameson's Philosophica l Journal. 
In 1826, Professor Fr. Nees Van Esenbeck the brother of the pre¬ 
sident, observed an infusory animal as the colouring material of red 
water, in a vessel of the botanical garden at Bonn, and which, in 
Kartner’s Arch. VII. p. 116, he, along with Goldfuss, his fellow- 
observer, called Enchelys sanguinea. It appeared that the colour of 
the body of the animal was produced by an internal brown-red granu¬ 
lar mass; that the extremities of the body were transparent, the hinder 
pointed, and the fore-part rounded. These accounts sufficiently shew 
that the animal has a similar form with the Cercuria viridis of Muller, 
though the observers say nothing either of the presence or absence 
of the important dark point in the forepart of the animal, which Nitsch 
correctly considers as an eye, and which constitutes the specific cha¬ 
racter of the genus. Weber, at Halle, found this point in his red 
animals, hence there remains no doubt as to the genus. Whether 
the volvox of Girod Chantran be one and the same, with Enchelys 
sanguinea has not been determined. 
The colouring of w r ater by means of Oscillatoria major, or by a 
a species having a close affinity to it, has been very recently made 
known to me, and that species has received from Bory St. Vincent 
the name of Oscillatoria Mougeotii. 
To the series of observations now concluded, I annex an observa¬ 
tion which I made in 1821 and 1823, at Cairo in Egypt. In the 
months of January and February, I found, in the garden of Mr. de 
Rosetti, on the soil of a place exposed to the morning sun, large spots 
of from 4 to 6 inches, and of different shapes. These spots seemed so 
very like clotted blood, that I frequently passed them without being 
tempted to examine them more closely. The remarkable circum¬ 
stance of blood being in this part of the garden, at length excited my 
attention by its abundance, and looking at it again, I took up some 
of it from the ground with my knife, and soon perceived on the deli¬ 
cately wrinkled surface that it was not blood, but a fungus. The 
Thelephora sanguinea was not known to me ; therefore I separated a 
portion of the mass from the soil, to add it to our collection of plants. 
