The blood-corpuscles of the annelides / by Professor Rolleston.

  • Rolleston, George, 1829-1881.
Date:
[1878?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The blood-corpuscles of the annelides / by Professor Rolleston. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    in size from the to the 2-r)]0fjth of an inch in long diameter, but by far the majority are of a uniform length of about ^oWth of an inch. The corpuscles have a clean, sharp outline, but occasionally what appears to be a small quantity of ragged pro- toplasm 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 (il. c.) by Professor Wharton Jones. Secondly, in the year 1852, Professor Ecker, in the third plate of his leones Physiologicoe (fig. 21), figures the blood-corpuscles of the earthworm under three denominations, viz., firstly (a, b, and c), “ Kdrperchen mit vielen Vacuolen und stachlichen Fortsatze, die Form und Stelle wechseln ; die Hohlraume mit gelblichem Schim- mer,” which amsebiform bodies I believe to be perivisceral in origin; secondly (d), “ Kerne,” one variety of which is granular, and the other hyaline as to its contents : and thirdly (e) “ Feine Korn- chen,” which till lately I held to be the only formed elements existing in the worm’s red fluid. But the two kind of bodies figured by Ecker at {d) are to be found in this fluid, when uncontaminated with perivisceral fluid, and before its morphology is upset by the setting-in of those changes to which all fluids containing colloids are so liable under the influence of so many disturbing agencies. Thirdly, in the year 1835 we find Rudolph Wagner (Muller’s Archiv. 1835, p. 313) asserting a claim to having seen the blood-corpuscles of the earthworm in 1832, and vindicating himself against an expression of surprise uttered by the elder Carus, in his Lchrbuch der Vergleich. Zootomic (ii. p. 682, 1834), at his not having discovered the “ deutlichen ruuden abgeplat- titen Blutkorperchen im rothen Blute des Regenwurmes.” Fourthly, Leydig’s words {Histologic, p. 437, 1857), “ Zu innerst sah man hocli vereinzelte blasse Kerne die wahrscliein- lich von Blutkiigelchen berriihrten,” appear to me to apply, even when I take the sentence in its own context alone, to the earth worm; and when I recollect that it was Leydig who pointed out {Archiv. fur Mikroskop. Amt. i. 281, 1865) that Chevtogastcr has no blood-corpuscles, I cannot but think that he would have made here the same remark as to Lumbricus if he had not seen it to be