Observations on certain parts of the animal oeconomy. Inclusive of several papers from the Philosophical transactions, etc / by John Hunter ... With notes by Richard Owen.
- John Hunter
- Date:
- 1840
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Observations on certain parts of the animal oeconomy. Inclusive of several papers from the Philosophical transactions, etc / by John Hunter ... With notes by Richard Owen. Source: Wellcome Collection.
80/494 page 72
![<i ce : Ba 72 _ HUNTER ON THE ANIMAL G&CONOMY. — _ The unnatural hermaphrodite,* I believe, now and then occurs in every tribe of animals having distinct sexes, but is more in common in some than in others ;f and is to be met with, in all its gradations, fecundate the ova of the same body, but where the concourse of two individuals is required, notwithstanding the co-existence in.each of the organs of the two sexes. Ex. the gastropodous mollusks, with the exception of the pectinibranchiate order, the class Annellida. . All the other invertebrates, as the cephalopods and pectinibranchiate gastro- pods, the insects, arachnidans and crustaceans, the epizoa, and the nematoid entozoa, are, like the vertebrate classes, dicecious, or composed of male and female individuals.] | * [The unnatural hermaphrodites may be divided into those in which the parts peculiar to the two sexes are blended together in different proportions, and the whole body participates of a neutral character, tending towards the male and female as the respective organs predominate, and into those in which the male and female organs occupy respectively separative halves of the body, and impress on each lateral moiety the characteristics of the sex. This latter and very singular kind of hermaphroditism has hitherto been found only in insects and crustaceans. In the Extracts from the Minute-Book of the Linnean Society, printed in the 14th Vol. of their Transactions, it is stated that Alex. MacLeay, Esgq., Sec. L.S., exhibited a curious specimen showing that two Papiliones, referred to distinct families by Fabricius, are in reality the male and female of the same species. This specimen presented the forms and colours of both sexes, divided by a longi- tudinal line on the body: the right wings and side of the body being as in the male (Papilio Polycaon, Fabr.), and the left as in the female (Papilio Laodocus, Fabr.). In Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History, (vol. iv. p. 434,) an experi- enced entomologist, Mr. J. O. Westwood, has given descriptions and figures, not only of dimidiate hermaphrodites, (the example is the Bombyx Penit) but also of quartered hermaphrodites: the latter sincular condition is exemplified in a speci- men of the Bombyzx castrensis, in which the right wing, left antenna, and left side of the abdomen are male; the left wing, right antenna, and richt side of the abdomen are female; and again ina Specimen of the stag-beetle (Lucanus Cervus), in which the left jaw and right elytrum are masculine, and the right jaw and left elytrum feminine. In most dimidiate hermaphrodites the left side is masculine ; but an example of the contrary has been observed in Sphinx Populi. It is to be regretted that the condition of the internal organs of generation cannot be ascer- tained in the above singular examples; but this deficiency is in some degree supplied by the results of Dr. Nicholl’s dissection of a hermaphrodite lobster, (Phil. Trans., xxxvi., p- 290,) in which a testis was found on that side of the body which exhibited externally the male characteristics, and an ovarium on the opposite side. ] T Quere: Is there ever, in the genera of animals that are natural hemaphrodites, a separation of the two parts forming distinct sexes? If there is, it may account for the distinction of sexes ever having happened.a . a ee a ee a [The separation of the two sexual organs from one another in the same body occurs in many of that class of. natural hermaphrodites which we have termed ‘allotriandrous;’ and there are many examples in the Hunterian collection showing the fact. - What, therefore, Mr. Hunter seems here to refer to is a spon- taneous fission of the body in the interval separating the two sexual parts, so that Some annellides, as the Nais, exhibit the phenomenon of spontaneous fission, but the separation never occurs so as to divide the two sexual organs from one another, and appropriate one to each division; and were even such an occurrence to be supposed ever to take place, the application of the fact to explain the occur- rence of the distinct sexes in the naturally dicecious classes seems more worthy of a speculatist of the Lamarckian school than of a sober observer of Nature.]](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b33292292_0080.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
