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him. He quite agreed with the remark that when a person looked at fibres 

 of this sort in large bundles he could make anything he liked out of them. 

 The President said he had been greatly interested in this paper and in the 

 discussion to which it had given rise. It was well known that Mr. Lowne 

 had devoted himself largely to insect anatomy, so that the points raised 

 were of extreme interest. Personally, however, he could add nothing to 

 what had been said, as the subject was one which was outside his own 

 department of study. If he recollected rightly there was a reference to it in 

 Professor Schafer's anatomy of a fly's leg, where it was stated that in the 

 duller bands there were certain rod-like substances which had highly refrac- 

 tive, somewhat swollen ends, lying in the lighter bands, and his view was 

 that these were detached structures lying within the darker band, the en- 

 larged ends appearing as black spots in the lighter band, so that in each 

 lighter band there was a double row of dots. He also mentioned that during 

 the contraction of the muscle, when the lengths of the rods shortened, the 

 size of the darker spots increased considerably, so that the light band became 

 a dark band in consequence of the greatly increased size of the dark ends. 

 His view was that these rods were entirely detached from those of other 

 bands, and were not connected by any intervening lines as Mr. Lowne had 

 shown. If, however, Mr. Lowne could demonstrate "what he had 

 described it would be a highly interesting addition to their knowledge of the 

 minute structure of muscle. 



Mr. B. T. Lowne said, with regard to the appearances which were found 

 in minute structures of this kind, everyone would, of course, take his own 

 view of what he saw. For his own part he regarded them largely as inter- 

 ference phenomena, and in this opinion he was certainly strengthened by 

 what Mr. Nelson had stated to be the result of his observations. They 

 would find that there were a hundred different opinions as to what these 

 appearances meant. They had been described over and over again, and they 

 were so exceedingly minute that he could not place much importance upon 

 observations upon muscle of ordinary mammals. Neither should he insist 

 strongly upon what he saw in the muscles of the fly, except for the fact that 

 the wing muscles were ten or fifteen times as large as those of any mamma- 

 lian. It had even been said that they were resolvable into minute fibrilhe, 

 and there was so distinctly a continuous line that he had no doubt whatever 

 as to its existence as a fact. With regard to nutrient material, perhaps it 

 was rather a popular mode of expression, but he regarded the functional part 

 as represented by the longitudinal bands, and thought the material which 

 kept them going was perhaps the protoplasm. He thought it was now 

 universally admitted that muscle nuclei split up into rods. This might be 

 wrong, but it was certain that the nucleus gradually disappeared under the 

 formation of the rods ; and it seemed, therefore, as if there must be some- 

 thing analogous between the two formations. What he meant to say was 

 that the nucleus was concerned somehow in the formation of the rods, and it 

 was quite certain that the nucleus disappeared and the rods took its place. 

 What he wanted shown was that diffraction could not account for the 

 appearances. The structure which he had observed appeared at least to be 



