Observations on the development of the medusæ / by John Reid.

  • Reid, John, 1809-1849.
Date:
[1848]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations on the development of the medusæ / by John Reid. 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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    J2~ . f Extracted from the Annals and Magazine of Natural IIisTORYyb/ January 1848.] Observations on the Development of the Meclusse. By John Reid, M.D., Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, and Chandos Professor of Anatomy and Medicine in the University of St. Andrews*. [With two Plates.] The following observations were made upon three colonies of the larvae of a Medusa. One of these was procured on the 15th of September 1845, and the other two on the 11th of July 1846, adhering to the lower surface of stones in pools near low water mark. The stones were of a size which readily permitted them to be conveyed home, where I have kept them up to the present time. The mode 1 have followed in keeping these animals alive is this. The stones to which they adhere are placed in vessels of considerable size, supplied daily with water fresh from the ocean, and the animals fed once or twice weekly with small morsels of mussels, which they readily swallow. The first of the three colonies consisted of between thirty and forty individuals, and the largest was between two and three lines in length; the individuals composing the other two colonies were more nume- ■ rous and of somewhat larger size. (After I had completed my examination of the structure of these animals I discovered that they had been described by Sars, first under the generic name of Scyphistuma, and afterwards as the larva of the Medusa\. Many of the larvae increased much in size several months after I ) took them home, and the body of one that I measured was ^rd of ■ an inch in length and }th of an inch in diameter; another was j T\ths of an inch in length and T\ths of an inch in circumference. * These observations were laid before the Literary and Philosophical i Society of St. Andrews at the Meetings of the 4th of May 1846 and the 5th • of April 1847, and abstracts ofthein were printed in the ‘ Transactions ’ of the - Society, and reprinted in Nos. 118 and 131 of the first scries of this Journal, f Annales des Sciences Naturelles, tom. xvi. p. 321, 1841.