There was a time when this parasitic creature had no ribbon-like body of flattened generative segments. There was, indeed, the same curious head, a tiny globose knob at the extremity of a slender neck, furnished with the same array as now, of rows of hooks and sucking disks. But in place of the segments, the neck merged into a membranous bladder distended with clear fluid. It was not a _Taenia_ then, but a _Cysticercus_. Its home was at that time the interior of a living animal on whose vitalized juices it was sustained, but that animal was widely different from its present patron. It was an Antelope, that cropped the wiry grass and aromatic shrubs of the arid plain. Earlier still, the germ of this _Taenia_ was an egg lying on the ground, having been discharged from the rectum of another Panther, in the bowels of which it had been developed by one of the segments of a former _Taenia_. Let us now trace the history of this organism onwards from the point at which we have arrived in our retrograde researches. The parent _Taenia_, still snugly ensconced in its obscene abode, partially matured and then separated the ultimate generative segment, containing many thousands of ova, far advanced towards perfection. The detached segment now became enclosed in the faeces of the Carnivore, and was at length discharged, enveloped in the pellet. The eggs, acquiring maturity, were hatched, and the infant worms individually scattered themselves among the surrounding herbage.[66] One of these was devoured with the herbage by a grazing Antelope, and having safely escaped the perilous ordeals of mastication and rumination, passed into the stomach of that Ruminant, whence it soon made its way by some unknown but unerring route to the liver, in the parenchyma of which organ it rapidly developed the cyst, which gave to the present stage its proper character. The Antelope fell a prey to the ferocious Cat; its flesh was quickly digested in the stomach, but the gastric juice produced no effect on the _Cysticercus_. This parasite had merely changed its residence for one more commodious, or at least more suitable for its further development. It presently attached itself to the walls of the intestine by means of its oral hooks and suckers, and, getting rid of its vesicular sac, with its fluid contents, probably by absorption, it began to develop, joint by joint, that immense ribbon, which it possesses now, and which constitutes it a Tapeworm. Such is the "strange eventful history" of this repulsive creature; a history legitimately deducible, in all its stages, from its presently-existing condition. But it is a history altogether illusory. The _Taenia_ never was a _Cysticercus_: the Panther is as yet guiltless of capricide: it is this moment called into being, and the Tapeworm begins existence within it.