ABSTRACT
It used to be (or we may even say that it is) an accepted commonplace of zoological science, that the red vascular fluid of the Chæcopoda is devoid of corpuscles. Certain exceptions have been admitted, but they have been regarded as exceptions. In reality they appear to be no exceptions but the rule. Professor E. Ray Lankester (‘Quart. Journ. Mie. Soc.,’ vol. xviii, 1878, p. 68) has demonstrated the existence of colourless corpuscles in the red vascular fluid of the earth-worm, and has described them as “small, oblong, flattened, fusiform bodies, with clear, sharp outline, beyond which occasionally appears a small quantity of ragged protoplasm,” and considers them to be merely nuclei of the cells forming the walls of the vessels which have become “free.”
