103 Mr. H. J. Carter on the Development of Gonidia 



will remain uninteresting until its subject is made more compre- 

 hensive, and it is on this account that I offer the following 

 additional observations, which, together with figures of all that 

 requires illustration in this, as well as in my former paper, will 

 furnish a key to what I have already described, and enable the 

 reader to correct for himself any false inferences which my 

 remarks may have caused from my imperfect knowledge of a 

 development, which at first appears more likely to be vegetable 

 than animal, and though subsequently proved to be the con- 

 trary, is after all situated in that part of the scale of living beings 

 with which we are least acquainted, and where many of the 

 organisms so much resemble the lower orders of both vegetable 

 and animal kingdoms, that on one day they are on this side the 

 line of separation and another day on that, as discovery turns 

 their balance in favour of one or the other of these great divisions 

 of organic life. 



With such introductory remarks let us proceed then to the 

 different parts of the subject which require further elucidation. 



It will be seen (at p. 6, Obs. cit.^), that the " gonidia," which 

 we shall henceforth call " monads," lost their cilium respectively 

 and passed into polymorphic, reptant cells, each of which con- 

 tained a contracting vesicle ; in fact, into Rhizopoda ; and here we 

 must leave them for the present, considering them as Amoebce, 

 which might or might not have had an ulterior development. 



Now we find by what Pringsheim has stated, that he not only 

 observed a similar development in the cells of Spirogyra, but 

 also in (Edogonium, Cladophora fracta, and in the young plants 

 of Nitella syncarpa ; to which I may here add the extent of my 

 own experience in this matter, viz. that such developments are 

 common in Chara and Nitella, Cladophora and Spirogyra ; occa- 

 sionally in Hydrodictyon ; in Closterium acerosum and Cosmarium 

 among the Desmidise, but never in the Diatomacese f ; common 

 in Euglena and in the dead bodies of Furcularian Rotifera. The 

 same or similar developments probably take place throughout 

 the whole of the freshwater Algae and in many of the Infusoria, 

 but T have only noticed them up to the present time in the 

 organisms mentioned. Again, wherever I have seen them, they 

 have appeared to me to have arisen from germs implanted in 

 the Algse or Infusoria in which they have occurred ; and the 

 organisms which have come from them have been Amoeba, Asta- 

 sia, or colourless flexible Oscillatoria (?). I am not certain that 



* After this, the page alone of these " Observations " will be men- 

 tioned. 



t The Asteridia of the Rev. W. Smith however appear to belong here, 

 and that naturalist has seen them " occasionally in the Diatomaceae.** 

 (Quart. Journ. Microscop. Sc. vol. i. p. 69.) 



