Natural- Historical Collections. 219 
leech. Some naturalists have derived, from the number of these organs, the 
names which they have given to the animal; but, as if they had taken them for 
mouths they have compounded the names of numerals and the word stoma ; thus 
we have distoma, hexastoma, polystoma. And Cuvier, himself, when, twenty- 
seven years ago, he discovered, in the Mediterranean, a species of this family 
with the suckers, conformed to the established custom, and named it éristoma. 
It is now well known, that the organs of which we speak, are no more used for 
the suction of food, than those of similar form which belong to the Sepiaria and 
leeches ; the animal employs them for attachment alone, and, with a little attention, 
we may easily observe the true mouth, which is unique, and very different from 
these suckers. | 
The terms distoma, polystoma, are, then, improper, and the great natural in- 
convenience which natural history experiences from a perpetual change of names, 
alone, induced M. Cuvier to prefer them to those of hewacotybus, and to the others 
which M. de Blainville has proposed, and which represent more exactly the organi- 
zation which ought to be designated.* 
But be this as it may, the animal presented to the Academy by M. Cuvier, 
belongs to the group of which we have spoken; but it is infinitely more poly- 
stomatous or polycotylous, than any of these which have been hitherto described ; 
moreover it is the giant of polycotyl. Most of these animals are small; many 
are microscopical; but this individual is four, five, and six inches long. It has 
more than a hundred suckers, and if we would preserve, in its nomenclature, an 
analogy with the neighbouring genera, it must be named hecatestoma or heca- 
toncotylus. 
In addition to the singularity of its comformation, the habitation it has chosen 
or which has been assigned to it by nature, is very remarkable. It lives in the 
abdominal cavity, or even in the substance of the flesh of the Octopus, the only 
apimal which surpasses it in the number of suckers. 
M. Cuvier remarks how this circumstance may appear favourable to those meta- 
physicians who amuse themselves compounding the entire intestinal worms, of ele- 
ments furnished by the bodies of the animals in which they live. The illusion 
will be at its height when they observe the body of an Octopus, which has a pa- 
rasite so much resembling its arm. One of the two Ociepi exhibited to the 
Academy, had the hecatoncotylus attached to one of ifs arms, which is even in 
some degree destroyed by it, and which it replaces insuch a manner, that at the first 
glance one might take it for the arm itself. ‘‘ Only consider,” says M. Cuvier, 
‘“‘howzmany systems might be founded on such extraordinary resemblances. 
Never was there a more curious subject on which the imagination might work. 
As for ourselves, who have long professed to record positive facts alone, we are 
confined to as exact a description as we are able to give, of the exterior and in- 
terior of our animal.” 
Naturalists owe the discovery of this worm to M. Laurillard, conservator of the 
anatomical galleries of the Museum of Natural History, who, being sent to Nice 
to collect the fishes of the Mediterranean, devoted himself at the same time to the 
observation and collection of all the other productions of this sea, so rich, and 
yet so little known. 
* With much less parade the same observations were made by Dr. Kuhn, in 
Saigey and Raspail’s Annal’s for June last. In describing a new species of 
Polystoma, (P. appendiculatum, from the branchie of the squalus catulus, ) he 
remarks, ‘‘ from examination of the animal, during life, I am able to verify the 
opinion of Professor Baer of Koenigsberg, viz. that the six pores of the Poly- 
stoma are not really mouths, but a kind of suckers, serving only to fix the ani- 
mal, and that the organ which M. Rudolphi and other helminthologists have 
considered as the anus, is, on the contrary, the true mouth. The name Polysto. 
ma is, consequently inexact ; but since it is generally received, and since, be- 
sides; we always know in what sense to take it we had better preserve it, than 
create new terms at every moment.” 
