178 Mr. Toulmin Smith on the Ventriculidae 



name of Scyphia (for instance), an immense number of objects 

 differing totally from one another in every character, and many 

 of them having no one essential character in common with the 

 definitions of the genus. From the same hurry in jumping to 

 conclusions, and eagerness, at all risks, to name and figure, has re- 

 sulted the disposition in our own country to call everything which 

 it is found difficult to understand and troublesome to investigate 

 either a sponge or a coprolite. We have seen that the Ventri- 

 culidse have, like many other as widely different things, been 

 thrown into the former category, and I have little doubt that, 

 by others, they have been thrown, with equal correctness, into 

 the latter. 



Observation then of mere external superficial form, as it is pre- 

 sented in recent specimens, still more as it always must be pre- 

 sented in fossil bodies, whether preserved in a hard or soft matrix, 

 can never lead to other results than we have seen to have been 

 arrived at by the numerous band of writers already named. By 

 such a course we can only again have, as we have had already, a 

 soft-bodied animal gravely described and figured by even such 

 an author as Blainville as having a central stony axis with deep 

 tubular cells — the so-called axis being the chalk or flint which 

 had filled the central cavity, and the so-called tubular cells being 

 simply the folds of the membrane forming the polypidom. The 

 same care is necessary to investigate the true structure, character 

 and habit of the polypidom as those of the polyps. Without the 

 nicest manipulation and observation neither can be known or 

 understood. And as without the aid of every artificial means the 

 very existence and nature of the whole class of recent Polyzoa 

 could have been never known, so the polypidonis of fossil zoo- 

 phytes can never be known or understood unless we go to work 

 — to vary the words of Van Beneden applied to a kindred sub- 

 ject — with the hand upon the slitting-wheel and the eye upon the 

 microscope. It is important too to remember, that even those 

 means are vain unless we have first made ourselves masters of the 

 nature and origin of the matrix itself in which the fossils are pre- 

 served. Without* that preliminary, nothing but confusion and 

 contradiction will appear in the observations. Without it, it will 

 be sufficiently evident that the important and satisfactory results 

 already arrived at as to the structure of the polypidom of the 

 Ventriculidse never could have been attained, and without it they 

 never can be verified. 



I cannot give a more conclusive or satisfactory illustration of 

 what may be done towards attaining a correct knowledge and 

 just classification of the polyps themselves by a careful inves- 

 tigation of the true nature and structure of polypidoms super- 

 ficially very different, than by reference to the labours of Milne 



