HA RD WICKE'S SCIENCE- G OSSIP. 





was nearly opaque, while the top part, owing to the 

 fineness of the membrane, was barely visible. I could 

 see no trace of nucleus or contractile vesicle. It 

 remained in this state till I went to bed, and I did 

 not see it again. I had so many Stylonychias at the 

 time that I made sure of finding some more couples ; 

 but as I said before, they suddenly vanished away. 

 This kind of encystment is quite new as far as I can 

 make out. It is only temporary, and apparently is 

 assumed expressly in order to get rid of the tentacu- 

 lifera. For it is evident that the tentaculiferous 

 enemy will remain outside the cyst while the Stylony- 

 chia gets away by another opening. The bursting 

 and ejection of protoplasm may also be a means of 

 defence, if it bursts just where the sphajrophrya is 

 holding on. 



The form also in which the protoplasm emerges is 

 quite new and strange. From its ordinary cyst, the 

 Stylonychia emerges unchanged, whilst here we have 

 a motionless oval body. What, again, is the meaning 

 of the swarming motion of the granules, and what has 

 become of the nucleus and contractile vesicle ? I am 

 painfully conscious of the incompleteness of these 

 observations, but they seem to me to be of sufficient 

 interest to be worth recording. When working at 

 questions of this sort, one ought to be prepared to sit 

 up all night if necessary ; but unfortunately my health 

 would not allow me to do that. 



J. G. Grenfell, B.A., F.G.S. 



Clifton College. 



GOSSir ON CURRFNT TOPICS. 

 By W. Mattieu Williams, F.R.A.S., F.C.S. 



THE GEOLOGICAL RECORD.— Those who 

 demand more and more of the "missing links" 

 that are required to fill the blank spaces in the 

 evolutionary series will find their wants very largely 

 supplied in the Reports of the United States Geo- 

 logical Survey of the Territories. The multitude of 

 new creatures, or new types or forms, there described 

 is so great that palaeontologists have heavy work 

 before them in classifying the new finds. Such 

 -discoveries, properly regarded, teach us that, in spite 

 of the great recent progress of geology, we yet know 

 but a small fraction of the sum total of the number of 

 species that have inhabited the earth during its past 

 history. Even in the best-explored districts we can 

 ■only find a few that have died under exceptional 

 circumstances, or which, having hard shells or other 

 exceptionally indestructible elements of structure, 

 have been exceptionally preserved. Those that have 

 shared the fate of the majority— have been eaten and 

 digested — leave few or no traces behind ; and those 

 which have died on dry land, far away from the sea 

 or lakes, must have decomposed or have been 

 crumbled to dust ere they could reach the position 

 of entombment. 



I have again and again expressed heretical notions 

 on this subject, and still maintain that when geologists 

 represent a certain era as the age of fishes, Crustacea, 

 or the inhabitants of swamps and marshes, they 

 perpetrate a serious fallacy ; the fact that only such 

 animals are represented by the fossils of the period 

 does not prove that such creatures were any more 

 representative of the period in question than they 

 are now. The creatures that lived in the sea, and 

 especially those in estuaries and near the mouths of 

 rivers, became entombed in the deposits formed by 

 the silt of such rivers, while of those on land only a 

 few specimens that have been accidentally drowned 

 under very exceptional circumstances could have 

 been preserved. All the stratified rocks were formed 

 in such places or on the sea-coast. Then again, how 

 small a fraction of the whole surface of the earth 

 have we yet scratched to any depth beyond soil- 

 tillage I 



Coal-dust and Colliery Explosions. — Mr. 

 W. Galloway, who has "done the State some ser- 

 vice " in showing that neglected deposits of coal-dust 

 are the great factors in producing great colliery 

 explosions, complains, and I think justly ( see 

 "Nature," Dec. 31), of the manner in which Sir 

 Frederick Abel, in an address to the Society of Arts, 

 has recently slighted the merit of Galloway's work. 

 I say " slighted " for want of a better word. It was 

 not exactly ignored, not directly denied, not positively 

 pooh-poohed, but all these modes of treatment were 

 combined. Sir Frederick said, " Several well-known 

 French mining engineers published, many years 

 after Faraday and Lyell wrote, observations and 

 experimental results as new which were simply con- 

 firmatory of those philosophers' original statements 

 and conclusions ; and, to some extent, this was also 

 the case in still more recent publications in this 

 country by Galloway and Freire-Marreco." That is 

 to say, that a number of Frenchmen, many years ago, 

 republished as new certain scientific work already 

 old and done by Englishmen ; and then later still, 

 Galloway has claimed as his own these ancient and 

 doubly appropriated researches. This is very hard 

 upon Galloway, in spite of the qualification "to 

 some extent." Being a regular contributor to the 

 journal (" Iron") in which so many of his communi- 

 cations on the subject have appeared, I have read his 

 papers, have become much interested in his work 

 (which began in 1870), and have no hesitation in 

 concluding that he is fully justified in all the state- 

 ments contained in the letter above named, and in 

 his complaints of the treatment he has received from 

 Sir Frederick Abel. At the same time there is no 

 evidence of ill-will nor intentional injustice, nor is 

 any attributed to Sir Frederick by Mr. Galloway. 

 It is simply a slighting due to imperfect knowledge 

 of the subject. Galloway's researches sliow, that in 

 great colliery explosions a relatively small quantity 



