136 Microscopical Society. 



Climacteris melanotus. Cli. strigd superciliari, guldque, albo- 



cervinis ; lined atite oculuni, alterd post oculum, omni swperiore 



corpore, alls, cauddque, saturate fusco-nigris ; primariis, secon- 



dariis, tertiariisque ad basin, et humeris infra stramineis ; corpore 



inferiore vinoso ; singula abdominis plumd lineis duabus spatium 



album marginantibus nigris longitudinaliter prope caulem ornatd. 



Superciliary line and throat bufty-white ; line before and behind 



the eye, all the upper surface, wings, and tail, dark brownish black ; 



the base of the primaries, secondaries, and tertiaries, and the under 



surface of the shoulder buff; under surface pale vinous brown; the 



feathers of the abdomen with two stripes of black running parallel 



to and near the stem, the space between dull white ; at the base of 



the throat several irregular spots of black ; under tail- coverts buffy- 



white, crossed by broad bars of black ; irides brown. 



Total length, 5^ inches ; bill, f ; wing, 3^ ; tail, 2^ ; tarsi, J. 

 The female differs in having the markings of the abdomen larger 

 and more conspicuous, and in having the spots at the base of the 

 throat chestnut instead of black. 



Hab. The neighbourhood of the river Lynd, in the interior of 

 Australia. 



Remark. — Nearly allied to C. melanura and C. scandens. 



MICROSCOPICAL SOCIETY. 



Nov. 11, 1846. — J. S. Bowerbank, Esq., F.R.S., President, in the 



Chair. 



A paper was read by Mr. John Quekett, entitled ** Additional Ob- 

 servations on the intimate Structure of Bone." 



The author, after alluding to a previous paper on the same subject 

 read before the Society in March last, in which he described certain 

 characters peculiar to the bones of each of the four great classes of 

 the vertebrate kingdom, by which a bone of each class could be 

 easily distinguished, and after pointing out the importance of the 

 knowledge of this subject to the palaeontologist and geologist in en- 

 abling them to determine the nature of any fossil fragment of bone 

 however minute, went on to state that he had ascertained that the 

 cells of the bone bore a certain relation in point of size to that 

 of the blood-discs ; thus for instance the blood-discs were found to 

 be largest in reptiles, smallest in birds and mammalia, and were in 

 fishes of an intermediate size ; and he had discovered that the bone- 

 cells followed the same law. In the present paper Mr. Quekett 

 stated the results of his examination of the structure of the bone of 

 the perennibranchiate reptiles, viz. the Syren, Proteus and Axolotl, 

 which have the largest blood-discs of all the vertebrata; and he 

 found that in them the bone- cells were the largest also, which 

 fully bore out and confirmed his former statement. Diagrams were 

 exhibited which represented the bone-cells in the human subject, the 

 Ostrich, Turtle, Syren and Lepidosteus, when magnified 450 dia- 

 meters, by which means their characteristic differences were ren- 

 dered very evident. 



A second paper by John King, Esq., Ipswich, was read, " On a 



