Gray's supplement to the Pharmacopoeia : being a concise but comprehensive dispensatory and manual of facts and formulae, for the chemist and druggist and medical practitioner / by Theophilus Redwood.

  • Gray, Samuel Frederick, 1766-1828.
Date:
1848
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Gray's supplement to the Pharmacopoeia : being a concise but comprehensive dispensatory and manual of facts and formulae, for the chemist and druggist and medical practitioner / by Theophilus Redwood. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    Scorpions feed on worms, spiders, small insects, and even one another. All the species are natives of warmer climates than ours. They run quickly, bending their tails in the form of an arch over their back. They are ovo-viviparous, the body of the pregnant female ex- hibiting, when dissected, between forty and fifty young. The poison of scorpions, though much more active, is said to resemble that of bees and wasps in many of its chemical characters. CLASS IV. INSECTA, INSECTS. (Class XIV. of General Division.) Insects form the most numerous class of all the animal kingdom. The bodies of this class of animals (with the exception of the Myria' poda) have been divided by naturalists into three parts: the head, which bears the antennae, the eyes, and the mouth; the thorax or corslet, which bears the feet and the wings, when there are any; and the abdomen, which is suspended behind the thorax, and contains the principal viscera. Those insects which have wings do not receive them till they are of a certain age, and frequently pass through two forms, more or less different, before they assume that of the winged insect. In all their states of existence they respire by means of tracheae, that is to say, by elastic vessels, which receive the air through stigmata, or external apertures in the sides of the body, and dis- tribute it by means of numberless ramifications to all parts of the body. There is but a vestige of a heart perceptible, and this consists of a vessel which lies along the back, and which exhibits alternate contractions, but from which no branches can be discovered to go off; so that we must conclude that the nutrition of the parts is carried on by imbibition. It is probably this sort of nutrition which induced the necessity of that kind of respiration peculiar to insects, because the nutritious fluid which was not contained in vessels, not being capable of being directed towards pulmonary organs so cir- cumscribed as to receive the air, the air must be diffused throughout the entire body, in order to act on this fluid. It is for this reason that insects have no excretory glands, but only long spongy vessels, which appear to absoi'b through their great extent of surface, from the mass of the nutritious fluid, the peculiar juices Avhich they are to produce. The class of insects has been divided into twelve orders:— The three first are composed oi apterous insects, (a priv., and impor, wing,) undei'going no essential change of form or habits, but merely subject to simple changes of tegument, or to a kind of metamorphosis, which increases the number of legs, and that of the annuli of the body. The organ of sight in these animals is usually a mere assem- blage, more or less considerable, of ocelli resembling granules. The first ordei', the Myriapoda, (/uvpioi, ten thousand, and ttovc, a foot,) has more than six feet—twenty-four and upwards—arranged along tlie whole length of the body, on a suite of annuli, each of which