Note 67 — Chapter V · EVOLUTION.

These luminous organs would furnish an interesting digression if space permitted it. The student is referred to the chapter in Milne Edwards’s Leçons sur la Physiologie et l’Anatomie Comparée, 1863, VIII. 94, sq. Leydig, Histologie, 1857, p. 343. Kölliker, Microscopical Journal, 1858, VIII. 166, and Max Schultze, Archiv für mikros. Anat., 1865, p. 124. My friend Schultze was kind enough to show me some of his preparations of the organs of Lempyris splendidula, from which the drawings in his memoir were made. They reminded me of the electric organs in fishes by a certain faint analogy, the trachea in the one holding the position of nerves in the other. I may remark, in passing, that it is not every phosphorescent animal that has distinct luminous organs. There is a lizard (Pterodactylus Gecko) which occasionally becomes luminous. “A singular circumstance occurred to the colonial surgeon, who related it to me. He was lying awake in bed when a lizard fell from the ceiling upon the top of his mosquito-curtain; at the moment of touching it the lizard became brilliantly luminous, illuminating the objects in the neighborhood, much to the astonishment of the doctor.” Collingwood, Rambles of a Naturalist, 1868, p. 169.