HEART-BEATS OF AN INSECT

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 7020, 7 January 1910, Page 9

HEART-BEATS OF AN INSECT

The remarkable series of "moving microbe" pictures exhibited before the French Academy of Science by means of a combination of the microscope and the cinematograph (says the- "Daily Elpress") has aroused the keenest interest ■in British medical scientific circles. Mr P. /Martin-Duncan, F.R.P.S., who first combined the use 6f microscope and oinematograph. and who is an authority on animal, plant, and insect life photography, declared to our representative that the value of the combination to medical, biological, and bacteriological science cculd scarcely be exasperated. "It moans a permanent record of the movements of minute organisms," said Mr Martin-Duncan, "and this record can afterwards be studied in detail at leisure."

Mr Martin-Duncan, by means of the combined apparatus, has already succeeded in taking a striking series of moving pictures, which have been exhibited before the Royal Society of Arts, the Litmean, and other learned societies. These include the following:— The movements of r. water flea, showing the heart actually beating, and the digestive process actually at work within its transparent body. ' The ciliary movements of the gills of ,a fresh-water mussel. ' The darting tongue and waving face-

hair of a, common house fly. foremosl among the transmitting agents of dU seasa. The various movements ot a •lngl4 leg of a minute centipede. The detailed circulation of blood m a frog, and, more remarkable still, tin circulation of protoplasm in common water-weed. , j The vr.rious stage* in a blood-suckWß South American cattle tick's attack on. its prer. _ Details in the eiego of a fragment ot cheese by cheese mites—silver. orab-lik« forms—which are shown with comprw benelve anatomical details.