EXPERIMENTS ON THE THREAD- CAPSULES. 159 



are seen, on examination, to be chiefly composed of the 

 "mlicating cells." Mr Gosse names the genus Sa- 

 gartia, because Herodotus says of the Sagartians, that 

 " when they engage with the enemy they throw out 

 ropes which have nooses at the end, and whatever any 

 one catches he drags towards himself, and they that 

 are entangled in the coils are put to death." The name, 

 you perceive, is aptly chosen, — that is, it would be, if 

 the hypothesis of the filaments were not a figment. 

 The filaments have no such lasso-like and murderous 

 power. This Mr Gosse would deny ; and I remember 

 he somewhere records an observation which would j^er- 

 haps quite satisfy him that his denial has good ground 

 to stand on. He relates that he once saw a small fish 

 in the convidsions of agony, with one of these filaments 

 in its mouth ; it shortly expii^ed. It is a matter of 

 surprise and regret that Mr Gosse, having once made 

 such an observation, did not feel the imperative neces- 

 sity of repeating and varying it, so as to be sure that 

 the death was not a mere coincidence. If the filament 

 had the power which this single observation fairly 

 seemed to suggest, nothing could be easier than to 

 establish the fact by experiment. But, I repeat, no one 

 has seen the necessity for the verification of an hypo- 

 thesis so plausible ; and Mr Gosse, like all his prede- 

 cessors, was content with recording his observation, as 

 if it carried the point.'"" Not being so content, I tested 



* How little reliance is to be placed on such an observation may be 

 gathered from the following : One evening, at the Scilly Isles, I was 

 startled from my reading by a commotion in the pan on the work- 



