HARDWICKE'S SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



199 



entering in at a wicket beside a cornfield gain 

 the route to Auray, and proceeding down it 

 come upon another battalion on the right, that for 

 want of a Joshua, suggest to our untutored minds a 

 game of hide and seek or a race-course. It has, 

 however, been suggested that they are mementoes of 

 some sort, or that they have even astronomical im- 

 port : and truly in lands where the sun is glorious 

 and stars are wildly and spiritually bright, temples 

 and altars may have arisen at the music of the 

 spheres, but while our churches are uniformly 

 oriented, it cannot escape notice that Stonehenge 

 faces south-west, while the lines of Carnac run south- 

 east. 



Having inspected something short of three thou- 

 sand grotesque stones, old and new, suitable to recall 

 to mind in the evening twilight the tale of the singing 

 bird and the enchanted water, we turn into the lane 

 on the left and gain the high road close beside the 

 tavern of Ker Petit, where we inquire of a rustic the 

 way to the railway-station at Plouharnel. I don't 

 understand that Gallic turnabout. Indeed no, we 

 have walked over thirty kilos, and desire to see the 

 Dolmen of the Mane-Kerioned if possible before we 

 leave. 



Note. — It would be curious to inquire whether 

 the late severe winter has produced many albino 

 stoats, blackbirds, or meadow brown butterflies ; 

 intense cold by checking secretion must surely be the 

 causation that here operates. In every case the 

 white variety is white from the absence of the usual 

 colouring-matter. 



A RETICULATED AMCEBA {BIOMYXA 

 VAGANS). 



THE observation of Biomyxa vagans in Calcutta, 

 is a sufficiently rare occurrence to justify me in 

 placing a note of it on record. The scientific name 

 of this interesting organism (from Gr. bios, life ; 

 nmxa, slime : Lat. vagans, wandering about, or 

 spreading out) accurately and concisely describes its 

 character. The granular, glassy protoplasm of which 

 it consists spreads itself out with a marked tendency 

 to polarity, its pseudopodial extensions being mainly 

 projected from its two opposite ends. These ex- 

 tensions are usually filaments, which branch and 

 interlace freely, thus forming an irregular network 

 which is constantly changing its form. The 

 filaments are prolongations of the central mass, 

 and are organically one with it. They here and 

 there anastomose with one another, so as to form 

 smaller expansions, comparable in all respects save 

 size, to the main mass. It seems possible from the 

 extreme fluidity of the whole, that any one of these 

 small expansions may be continually fed by the 

 flow from the main mass, till it becomes itself the 

 main mass ; and it is conceivable that the nucleus 

 may, in this way, be left behind in the web of the 



pseudopodial net-work, as has been suggested to me 

 by Mr. Wood Mason, and may thus escape detection. 

 Along the glassy threads of the network, solitary or 

 associated granules course with varying degrees of 

 rapidity, and where most active at a rate exceeding 

 that of the protoplasmic current (cyclosis) in Vallis- 

 neria. A lady to whom I showed the specimen 

 under description in this note, said it looked as if it 

 was pouring itself out into itself — a happy way of 

 expressing the appearance of this interesting pheno- 

 menon. The flow in the thicker, and indeed in many 

 of the finer, pseudopodia, as the projections or 

 the extensions of the body-mass are called, and in 

 the main mass itself, is in opposite directions en 

 the two margins ; while in many of the finer filaments 

 minute, elliptical, or fusiform particles of protoplasm 

 glide like rain-drops along a telegraph wire. Nu- 

 merous minute vacuoles appear in the central 

 portions, and some also in the pseudopodial exten- 

 sions and their knot-like expansions. There is no 

 distinction of the body-substance into an outer, or 

 cortical, denser protoplasm (exoplasm), and an inner, 

 more fluid, medullary protoplasm (endoplasm), the 

 animal being of the same highly fluid consistence 

 throughout ; nor is a nucleus to be detected, though 

 this last feature may be due, as already suggested, to 

 the nucleus having been left stranded, as it were, 

 somewhere in the reticulated pseudopodial expansions. 

 Three or four diatoms — a species of Cocconeis 

 which is abundant this season in the tank from which 

 Biomyxa was obtained by me — and one or two stray 

 filaments of a minute green Alga were imbedded in 

 the protoplasm of the main mass of the organism 

 observed by me.* The same water was also the 

 habitat of numbers of minute flagellated monads, 

 bearing two flagella, one trailing behind and the 

 other projected forward ; and I watched with 

 interest several in which the anterior flagellum seemed 

 to have become caught in the current of the proto- 

 plasm, flowing in the reticulated filaments ; these 

 organisms were clearly being towed along the 

 pseudopodia, and three or four were observable, with 

 careful focussing, in the central mass of the organism ; 

 but it could not with certainty be made out whether 

 they were imbedded in it, or were merely adhering 

 to its surface. A larger monad, with only a single 

 flagellum, constantly swam up to the circulating 

 mass ; touched it repeatedly, and as it seemed 

 intentionally, with its whip-like appendage ; and 

 released itself without apparent difficulty or effort. 

 My objectives are not of sufficiently wide aperture to 

 admit of my detecting the flagella of the Bacteria, 

 but several Bacteria were being swept along by the 

 marginal protoplasmic current ; and from their 

 motions as compared with those of the Flagellata 

 referred to above, it seemed obvious that they too 



* Diatoms appear to have formed the chief nourishment of 

 Haeckel's Protomyxa aurantiaca. See Vol. IX., " Quarterly 

 Journal of Microscopical Science," pp. 40 and 42. 



