Abstract
IN your issue of May 4 you refer in a note to a suggestion made by my friend and former pupil, Dr. Paul Pelseneer that the green amæboid cells described by me as occurring on the surface of the gills of green oysters are to be interpreted as out-wandered phagocytes. It is, I think, only right to point out that Dr. Pelseneer (as he is careful to explain in the note published by him) has made no new observations on the matter, and merely professes to give an interpretation of the facts which I described in 1886 in the Quart. Journ. Micr. Set. in my article on green oysters. I there described and figured large granular cells occurring in and upon the epithelium of the gill-filaments and regarding them as epithelial secretion-cells attributed to them the active part in the elimination of the blue pigment “marennin” taken in by the oyster in its food—the diatom Navicula ostrearia. At that time the general doctrine of “phagocytosis” had not been so fully developed as it is now seven years later. But I may say that already in 1887 one of my pupils (Mr. Blundstone) had established to my satisfaction the existence of extensive out-wandering of phagocytes through the surface epithelium of Anodon in various regions of the body, and that I was very soon led by the accumulating evidence of a similar kind (e.g. Durham's observations on star fishes) to adopt the view that the large “secretion-cells” discovered by me both in the epithelium of the oyster's gill and freely moving on its surface, were out-wandered phagocytes. I have taught this view in my lectures, and have made some further observations (two years ago) on similar out-wandering phagocytes in other Lamellibranchs. The subject is one well worthy of minute study, phagocytosis in Mollusca being as yet an unexplored ground likely to yield results of great physiological importance.
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LANKESTER, E. Phagocytes of Green Oysters. Nature 48, 75 (1893). https://doi.org/10.1038/048075a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/048075a0
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