VERMES, CCELENTERA AND PROTOZOA. 175 



In a great many Foraminifera, he finds a considerable 

 number of small irregular bodies lying in the substance 

 of the nucleus. They are sometimes spherical in shape, 

 sometimes angular and pointed, frequently collected to- 

 gether in grape-like clumps. Another feature common 

 to them is their extreme irregularity in number ; in the 

 arenaceous Foraminiferan Saccammina sphaerica, for ex- 

 ample, they vary from 1-300 in number. Similar structures 

 have been described by Hertwig in Thalassicola, by 

 Stanley Marshall in certain Gregarines, and bv several 

 observers in the germinal vesicles of ova. 



Rhumbler considers that the changes in their shape, 

 and the way they react to staining fluids, proves that 

 they are not really organised structures, but are due to 

 the accumulation in the substance of the resting- nucleus 

 of organic substances, which are at first fluid, then become 

 viscid, and eventually solid. Their extreme irregularity 

 in occurrence, some nuclei being apparently quite devoid 

 of them, and their disappearance before karyokinetic 

 changes commence, lend very strong support to Rhum- 

 bler's views. There can be little doubt that they are not 

 of the same nature as the well-known chromatin bodies, or 

 that they are not directly converted into them, but whether 

 they are, as it were, stores of proteid food material, by 

 which the chromatin bodies are nourished during their 

 rapid growth at the commencement of Karyokinesis, is a 

 question which it is at present very difficult to decide. 



A great deal of good work has recently been done in 

 the group of parasitic Protozoa — the Sporozoa, more par- 

 ticularly in their relation to disease, but as an account of 

 these researches would lead jjs beyond the limits assigned 

 to this article, a consideration of them will be left for the 

 next number of this journal. 



Sydney J. Hickson. 



