of the Shell of Operculina Arabica. 163 



view to establishing the relation that might exist between them 

 and Infusoria. 



** In comparing them with Infusoria, he states, in a note ad- 

 dressed to the Academie Royale des Sciences of Paris *, ' I have 

 always been guided by an idea suggested by Bory St. Vincent, 

 who, after having seen the living Rhizopoda, was struck with the 

 great analogy which existed between the filamentous prolon- 

 gations of these animals and the expansions of the Amoeba or 

 Proteus, and directed my attention to the point.^ 



'* Lastly, Dujardin exhibited before the Acad. Roy. des Sc. at 

 Paris in 1836 f some animalcules, called by Ehrenberg Arcella 

 aculeata, but which Dujardin regarded as freshwater Forami- 

 nifera, and through these he imagined the series to be continued 

 from the Amoeba to Miliola, — that is, through Difflugia, a species 

 of Amoeba, to Arcella, from the latter to Gromia, and from Gro- 

 mia to Crestellaria, and thence to Miliola, 



" After Dujardin, Ehrenberg took up the subject, and the re- 

 sult of his researches is as opposed to D'Orbigny^s description 

 as it is confirmatory of Dujardin^s observations. 



" In a memoir read at the Royal Academy of Sciences at Berlin 

 in 1838 {, Ehrenberg stated that the Foraminiferous shells were 

 inhabited by elegant little bodies which played an important 

 part in nature, and the fossilized remains of which might fre- 

 quently be found to number more than a million in a cubic inch 

 of chalk ; also, that after a series of observations made on recent 

 species both living and dead in the Red Sea and elsewhere, he 

 had come to the conclusion that their place in the animal king- 

 dom should be among the Bryozoa. 



"In the month of October 1839 §, Ehrenberg also exhibited 

 living specimens of these animals to the Academy at Berlin, [two] 

 which were taken at Cuxhaven, and in January 1840 he exhibited 

 ten other species of these animals ||, at the same time communi- 

 cating the following observations on their organization : — 



^' ' The first and largest cell of these animals, sometimes also 

 the second, and occasionally as far back as the fourth, contain 

 only the transparent part of the animal ; beyond this, the cells 

 are filled with two large organs difierently coloured. One and 

 the principal is an alimentary canal, thick, gray, greenish, which, 

 like the whole of the body, is articulated; this extends itself 

 from chamber to chamber, and its divisions are united by an 



* Seance Fev. 1, 1836. t Seance Juin 11, 1836. 



X Ibid, seance de 16 Janvier 1840. L*Institut, No. 350, Sept. 1840, 

 p. 309. 



§ Acad. Roy. des Sc. Berlin, seance de 16 Janvier 1840. Vide Tlnstitut, 

 No. 350, Sept. 1840, p. 309. 



II Ibid, [and Taylor's Scientific Memoirs, \o\. iii. p. 342.] 



11* 



