130 NATURAL SCIENCE [August 



Germans elect to style it. Two of these small sketches exist in the 

 Dresden picture gallery. It should also be remarked, that Von 

 Biedermann gives a list of the known representations of the Dodo, 

 numbering fourteen altogether. 



Dr Meyer pens a short note upon remains of Alca imjyennis from 

 Swedish deposits, including a left coracoid bone obtained at Greby in 

 the province of Bohuslitn, among fragments of pottery and bones of 

 the ox, pig, and sheep. 



Finally, we must draw attention to the essay of Mr Yoigt upon 

 the love-notes of the Capercailzie or ' Auerhahn ' ( Tetrao urogallus), 

 and the Blackcock or ' Birkhahn ' (Lyrurus tetrix), which he has 

 taken the pains to set to musical notation ; and to a remarkable 

 variety of the common European Kingfisher (Alcedo isjrida), which 

 is admirably figured. The curious point about this specimen, which 

 was procured upon the Bhine between Mainz and Worms, is that the 

 plumage of the upper surface is half green and half deep blue, the 

 two colours being equally distributed. H. A. M. 



Sponge Spicules 



Materials for a Monograph of the Ascons. I. On the Origin and Growth of 



THE TRIRADIATE AND QUADRIRADIATE SPICULES IN THE FAMILY CLATHRINIDAE. 



By E. A. Minchin, M.A., Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. Reprinted from the 

 Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science, n.s. vol. xl., pp. 469-587, pis. xxxviii. - 

 xlii. , January 1898. 



Mr Minchin is almost a social phenomenon. He was appointed 

 nearly five years ago to an Oxford fellowship, after competitive 

 examination in natural science. The formal theory of such fellow- 

 ships is that they should fill, so to speak, the yolk-sac of an embryonic 

 scholar in some branch of human knowledge, and provide him with 

 the metabolic material known as gold. These halcyon years the 

 fellow (theoretically) devotes to the pursuit of his particular branch 

 of knowledge ; he has the opportunity to develop into a fully equipped 

 investigator, and may be supposed in this process to have issued a 

 considerable body of actual research. At the end of that period, on 

 the aboriginal hypothesis as to the place of fellows in the universe, a 

 patron should present the fellow to a fat country living, where, dwell- 

 ing in the fear of God and the friendship of the squire, the endowed 

 scholar should continue his studies. In the modern world, however, 

 a fat country living is not the natural reward of successful investiga- 

 tion. For this reason it happens, at least in Oxford, that the research 

 fellow seldom does research. Sometimes he goes to the bar ; some- 

 times to medicine; sometimes to commerce; sometimes he enters with 

 ardour into the boarding-school industry, and becomes a useful man 

 to his college. In any event it is almost an anachronism for him to 

 devote the major part of his endowed time to research. How Mr 

 Minchin can reconcile it with his own interests that he has fulfilled 

 the plain purpose of a fellowship by giving up his time to research we 

 cannot pretend to say, but the first part of the monograph now before 

 us, and a series of earlier memoirs, are ample evidence as to the fact. 



The present memoir deals with points incidentally obtained in the 

 course of Mr Minchin' s attempt to get materials for a complete mono- 

 graph of the Ascons. For all sponge histology he found it of import- 

 ance to carry with him, when seeking for specimens, tubes containing 



