Note 76 — IDEAS FOR A PHYSIOGNOMY OF PLANTS.
Henry G. (Henry George) Bohn translation
251p. 213—“Which inhabits the lungs of the Rattlesnake of the tropics.”
The animal which I formerly named an Echinorhynchus, and to which I even applied the term Porocephalus, appears, on a closer inspection, according to Rudolphi’s better grounded opinion, to belong to the division of Pentastoma.[KN] It is found in the abdominal cavity and the wide-celled lungs of a species of Crotalus, which, in Cumana, occasionally infests even the interior of houses, and preys on mice. The Ascaris lumbrici[KO] lives beneath the skin of the common earth-worm, and is the smallest of all the species of Ascaris. Leucophra nodulata, Gleichen’s pearl animalcule, has been observed by Otto Friedrich Müller in the interior of the reddish Nais littoralis.[KP] It is probable that these microscopic animals are, in their turn, inhabited by others. All are surrounded by air, deficient in oxygen, and copiously charged with hydrogen and carbonic acid. It is extremely doubtful whether any animal could exist in pure nitrogen, although such an opinion did, formerly indeed, seem warranted with reference to Fischer’s Cistidicola farionis, since, according to Fourcroy’s experiments, the swimming-bladder of fish was presumed to contain air wholly devoid of oxygen. But the experiments made by Erman, and confirmed by myself, prove that the swimming-bladder of fresh-water fish never contains pure nitrogen.[KQ] In sea fish as much as 0·80 parts of oxygen have been found, while, according to Biot’s views, the purity of the air depends on the depth at which the fishes live.[KR]