No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 January 2013
These notes have been made at different intervals of time, and in different places,—some, and the majority of them, in Malta, in 1832–33,—some at Constantinople in 1839–40, and a few at a still earlier period, viz. in 1816, when on a voyage to Ceylon.
Imperfect and brief as many of them are, I am induced to submit them to the Society, thinking they may be of some use as conveying the results of unbiassed observation, and that, as such, they may prove a small contribution, to a difficult branch of icthyology,—difficult, not indeed so much from the nature of the subject as from the comparatively few opportunities enjoyed by naturalists of obtaining specimens.
page 491 note * See Physiol. and Anat. Res., vol. i. p. 55, for an account of these organs.
page 492 note * Fig. 1. The oviducts expanding into a uterine cavity. Fig. 3. Kidney and urinary bladders.
page 492 note † I use this term for the sake of convenience in its ordinary sense, and not being aware of any sufficient reason for discontinuing it, seeing that it performs the same part as the umbilical cord in the mammalia, connecting the embryo with its source of nourishment: moreover, a mark remains of it, denoted by a depression, after its removal by absorption, which may be called an umbilicus. This at least I have seen in the young torpedo.—See my “Researches Physiol. and Anat.,” plate vii. fig. 1., in which it is shown.
page 492 note ‡ See Plate XXIL., fig. 2
page 495 note * See Physiol. and Anat. Res., ii. p. 451.
page 496 note * PI. XXIL., fig. 4.
page 496 note † See fig. 5.
page 496 note ‡ Fig. 6.
page 498 note * See Plate XXII., fig. 7.
page 499 note * Other instances of a like kind might be mentioned, showing how provident Nature is in giving instincts and organs to young animals, suitable to their protection when in their feeblest state, and their lives, in consequence, most in danger. The fœtus of the torpedo, even before birth, I have found capable of giving a shock. In the fœtus of the viper (Coluber berus) I have found the poison-fangs developed. The young alligator I have seen, as soon as it left the egg—and that prematurely, from the egg being broken—make to the adjoining water, and, if stopt, attempt to bite the arresting object.
page 499 note † See plate XXII., fig. 8.
page 500 note * This water is less salt than that of the sea—the Mediterranean and ocean—nearly the same as that of the Euxine. I have found it of sp. gr. 1012. that of the Euxine being 1011.
page 500 note † See Plate XXII., fig. 9.
page 502 note * See Plate XXII., fig. 10.
page 502 note † See Plate XXII., fig. 11.
page 502 note ‡ See Plate XXII., fig. 12.
page 503 note * See Plate XXII., fig. 12.
page 503 note * See Plate XXII., fig. 13.
page 504 note * See Physiol. and Anat. Res., vol. i. p. 65.
page 504 note † See Hist. Nat. des Poissons, par MM. Cuvier et Valenciennes. The remains of the vitellus is described by the former (inferring that the first volume was written by Cuvier) as adhering to the uterus almost as firmly as a placenta. This I have never witnessed; nor have I ever witnessed, till at an advanced period, the interior lobe of the vitellus, which is described by him as always existing in the fœtus,—“comme un appendice de l'intestin.”—See loc. cit.
page 505 note * Macri, in Atti della Reale Accademia Scienze (of Naples), vol. i, uses a very ingenious argument of the kind above alluded to: “In natura osservi una legge costante ed invariable, stabilata dall' omnipotente, che quando gli animali maschi son corredati d'una sola verga, le lor femmine hanno eziando una sola vulva ed un sol utero. E all' opposto, dove le medesime son provvedute di due vulve, o d'una bifurca, e die due uteri, o d'un uteri bifido, posseggno i maschi o una verga bifida o un doppio membro generatore” (p. 83).