Mr. Hassall's Notices of British Freshwater Conferva. 339 



of the classes of Confervae referred to leads necessarily to some 

 general, and it appears to me not unimportant reflections. 



Thus, first, it furnishes evidence amounting to demonstra- 

 tion of the intimate and general connexion which subsists be- 

 tween the greater number of the articulated Confervae with 

 simple filaments ; and second, it throws much light upon the 

 often-canvassed and much-disputed subject of the animality 

 of the conjugating genera. It proves, since in reality a con- 

 jugation is necessary to the formation of every true spore, 

 that all the Confervae stand upon the same footing as regards 

 their animal nature, and that if those species which exhibit 

 the curious phaenomena of conjugation are really animal, so 

 are all the other Confervae mentioned ; that if these should 

 ever at any subsequent period be removed from the vegetable 

 kingdom to the animal, so ought as a sequitur all the other 

 Confervae alluded to, the Vesiculasperma and the Sph&roplece. 



But it appears to me that the facts thus disclosed, so far 

 from adding weight to the arguments of those who would re- 

 gard the Conjugates as animal productions, rightly interpreted, 

 tend merely to prove the existence of sexes in the Confervae, as 

 have been proved by Vaucher to exist in the genus Vaucheria, 

 a class of productions nearly related to the Confervae ; and that 

 thus an analogy is established between the lower Confervae 

 and the higher phanerogamic plants, between which and some 

 of the lower animal tribes a further analogy may be traced. 



For my own part I trouble myself but little with the dis- 

 putes about the boundaries of the two great divisions of the 

 organized world, which forcibly remind me of the search car- 

 ried on by ancient philosophers for days and years after the 

 much-desired but imaginary and poetical philosopher's stone 

 endowed with such all-pervading influence, or the equally 

 fruitless inquiry after perpetual motion, or any of the other 

 wild chimeras to which the minds of men have from time to 

 time been given. It is my belief that no such rigid boundary 

 exists, for in living nature there are no abrupt unsightly 

 chasms ; all is uniformity, order, design and transition. 



I would now mention one fact which would appear to show 

 that in the composition of the Confervae there is something 

 of the animal. When a number of Confervae have been 

 crowded together in a bottle for two or three days, they emit 

 on their removal what appears to my power of smell to be 

 a strongly animal and offensive odour. A similar offensive 

 smell is emitted by some marine sponges in a state of decay, 

 and as I have more than once noticed, by the freshwater 

 sponge. 



Z2 



