ON A NEW SPECIES OF TECHNITELLA FROM THE NORTH SEA. 411 



from sinking through the surface layer of ooze in which its food 

 lies, into the dead mud beneath. 



Probably we should be considered as imposing too weighty a 

 postulate upon the members of the Club if we ventured to suggest 

 that these rudimentary organisms were gifted with any aesthetic 

 sense. We therefore content ourselves with placing it on record, 

 without further comment, that Reophax scorpiurus (Montfort), 

 one of the most variable and cosmopolitan species, shows at times 

 a marked tendency to favour brightly coloured or bizarre frag- 

 ments in the construction of its test. Garnets are especially 

 favoured by the Moray Firth specimens, but we have also one 

 specimen which has gone out of its way to annex a vertebra from 

 a carboniferous fish. The same partiality for garnets is notice- 

 able in Verneuilina polystropha (Reuss) at several stations in the 

 Moray Firth, and we have observed the phenomenon also in 

 specimens collected at one particular station off* Selsey Bill in 

 Sussex, where Verneuilina and Haplophragmium work up, not 

 only garnets and magnetite, into their tests, but also a rhom- 

 boidal gem-mineral (?), the precise nature of which is at present 

 engaging our attention. 



To recapitulate these prolegomena towards the study of 

 structural design (in both its senses, intention and result), it 

 would appear that this " primordial, protoplasmic, atomic globule" 

 is by no means so elementary an organism as naturalists are in- 

 clined to believe. The study of the laws upon which are based the 

 principles of that " selection" which forms the subject of this paper 

 goes hand in hand with that of the reproductive functions of the 

 foraminifera. Earland has published some of the results of his 

 observations upon the latter subject in the Journal of this Club.* 

 It is probably reserved for some careful observer endowed with 

 great wealth of time and opportunity to make so minute a study 

 of the living foraminifera as to arrive at a revelation of the pro- 

 cesses by which these higher functions of the Order are governed 

 and exercised. 



Description of Plates. 



Plate 31. 



Technitella thompsoni, sp.n. 



After a pen-and-ink drawing of the lost specimen from Station 

 41 C made by Mr. Akehurst. Viewed as a transparent object in 

 balsam. The protoplasmic body is visible as an irregular dark 



* Jowrn. Queltett Microscopical Club, Ser. 2, Vol. IX. No. 57, November, 

 1905 : " The ForarniniferH of the Shore Sand at Bognor, Sussex." 



