V. 



70 Miscellaneous, 



gela and Lough Dan appeared a few days before the latter date* 

 We may therefore conclude that two individuals of this species have 

 been met with. Mr. Ball considers that the full strong plumage 

 which the specimen presents, denotes a truly wild bird, and one 

 which could not have escaped from confinement. According to the 

 descriptions of Wilson and Richardson, it is a female, and not, at all 

 events, in younger plumage than that of the second year. 



Belfast, Dec. 3, 1845. Wm. Thompson. 



rSPICULA OF MOLLUSCA. 

 Fusiform spicula are common in sponges, and in the flesh of seve- 

 ral of the true radiated animals, as the fleshy parts of Lobularia, 

 and of many other of the Zoophytaria, where they form a kind of ske- 

 leton to support the more fleshy kinds ; the existence of them in the 

 fleshy corals and the sponges has been regarded as one of the rea- 

 sons why the sponges must be animals. I am not aware that these 

 bodies have been observed in Mollusca ; but the genus Phyllidia, 

 which is destitute of any true shell, has its mantle strengthened with 

 a regular network formed of ropes of simple, regular, fusiform, trans- 

 parent spicula about a line or a line and a half in length. 



These ropes of spicula form lines which radiate round the cir- 

 cumference of the mantle, and these are crossed at right angles by 

 other ropes of spicula which are parallel to the edge of the mantle, 

 leaving square interspaces which decrease in size, and the ropes de- 

 creasing in thickness as they approach the edge. The spicula are 

 also very abundant and larger in the interspaces of the flesh of the 

 foot. J. E. Gray. 



INDIAN SPECIES OF PAPILIO. 



To the Editors of the Annals of Natural History. 



Gentlemen, — Being the "English entomologist" alluded to by 

 Mr. E. Doubleday as having given information to Dr. Erichson re- 

 specting certain Indian species of Papilio, which I knew to be erro- 

 neous (vol. xvi. p. 305), I must request you, in justice to Dr. Erichson 

 and myself, to state that Dr. Erichson has nowhere, either in his 

 'Bericht' for 1842 or elsewhere, stated that P. Ganesa is synony- 

 mous with P. Arcturus, P. Polyeuctes with P. Bootes, and P.Xenocles 

 with P. Pollux. His observations refer to the respective juxtaposi- 

 tion of the four first-named species, and to the possibility of the two 

 latter being identical, evidently founded upon a comparison of Mr. 

 Doubleday's description of P. Xenocles with my note on P. Pollux, 

 that the latter " variat magnitudine macularum." It is hard that 

 Dr. Erichson should have the errors of his translators laid on his 

 shoulders, and it is still harder that I should have such an imputa- 

 tion as the above laid to my charge, which you will thus see has no 

 other foundation than the imagination of its author, and which was 

 the more uncalled-for, as I had denied the imputation long ago in 

 Mr. Doubleday's presence at the British Museum. 



Probably it will be further ascertained by a bona fide examination 

 of Dr. Erichson's 'Bericht' itself, that some of the other " very nu- 



