Volume 1
Scientific papers and addresses / / by George Rolleston; arranged and ed. by William Turner; with a biographical sketch by Edward B.Tylor.
- George Rolleston
- Date:
- 1884
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Scientific papers and addresses / / by George Rolleston; arranged and ed. by William Turner; with a biographical sketch by Edward B.Tylor. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.
582/594 page 492
![similar habits, not to say structure, of which would have been likely to suggest a comparison. One of the most surprising statements in Professor Lankester's paper is to be found on the first page of it (p. 68), and it runs thus :— ' The fact, however, that abundant corpuscles are present in this same fluid [the red vascular fluid of Chaetopodous worms] in the case of the earthworm (and, as appears very probable, in all similar fluids) has hitherto escaped detection, owing to the difficulties of observation which small corpuscles floating in a deeply-coloured liquid present, and also to the fact that the method by which they may be rendered apparent has not been applied to them by the various observers who have occupied themselves with this matter.' It is difficult indeed to understand, and I shall not make any suggestions as to how Professor Lankester can have come to write this. Professor Wharton Jones, whose writings and views as to the morphology of blood-corpuscles are referred to in every text- book, for example, in the latest edition of Quain and Sharpey and Schafer, 1876 (p. 42), as 'supported by Busk, Huxley, and Gulliver,' has devoted an entire page (p. 94) of the ' Philosophical Transactions^ for 1846, the volume containing the memoir thus currently quoted, to the blood-corpuscles of the earthworm. Amongst many other objects which Professor Wharton Jones re- cords as having been procured by him from the blood of the earthworm, he mentions ' corpuscles altogether like the nucleus and its surrounding granulous mass/ of certain nucleated cells ' both in form and size.' This ' cellaeform nucleus is about ^^Voth of an inch in diameter, with a finely granulous mass surrounding it.' Professor Lankester describes the corpuscles of the earthworm as follows :— * They are flattened fusiform bodies, usually somewhat broader at one end than the other, sometimes nearly circular. They vary in size from the „^'g-^th to the asVo*^ an inch in long diameter, but by far the majority are of a uniform length of about ^ij^th of an inch. The corpuscles have a clean, sharp outline, but occasionally what appears to be a small quantity of ragged protoplasm is seen beyond this sharp contour.' Professor Lankester has not, in this paper, given us any figures of the corpuscles thus clearly described. When his promised figures do appear, it will be interesting to compare them with the descriptions and figures given (1. c.) by Professor Wharton J ones. Secondly, in the year 1852, Professor Ecker, in the third plate](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24758358_0001_0582.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
