276 Transactions of the Society. 



As, moreover, in addition to the fact that at the peristome the 

 envelope is darker-coloured, the upper lip overhangs the lower, the 

 double thickness of the envelope, increasing the opacity, appears to 

 the eye as a longitudinal ribJoon, darker than the rest of the 

 surface. 



The buccal orifice is thus reduced to a long narrow fissure, 

 tangential to the surface of the shell, and so disposed that the 

 plasma, in making its way to the surface, must necessarily form 

 a living mantle, creeping over a floor and covered by u roof 

 (fig. 2). 



This plasma, it must be admitted, remains unknown to us ; the 

 collections when studied had been for some time in formalin. 

 "What of the pseudopodia, are they broad or filiform, lohosa or 

 Jilosa ? Very probably, when we consider the apparent affinities 

 of the organism, they will be found to be broad, and the species 

 will belong to the Thecamcebvea lobosa ; but the fact is not 

 established. 



The moss in which these rhizopods were found had been in the 

 dry state for some time before being put in formalin, and some 

 animals had had time to encyst themselves. Though the majority 

 of the shells were empty, some still contained their plasma, and 

 %vhen the plasma was exposed by the tearing of the envelope, it 

 appeared as a spherical mass, covered with a fine pellicle, and in 

 the interior of which could be seen some pellets of food. As to 

 the nucleus nothing can be stated with certainty ; the half-dozen 

 cysts which I was able to study after staining with carmine (the 

 staining, moreover, never very successful), showing merely, for the 

 most part, a faint and unequal colouring. In one of them a darker 

 tract of very irregular outline, seemed to indicate the presence of a 

 nucleus, but might on the other hand be merely some animal prey 

 with easily coloured flesh. In another, the best stained among 

 those examined, there were, disseminated throughout, a considerable 

 number of little globules, of 3/i in diameter, darker in colour than 

 the rest of the plasma, and which it seemed to me could be nothing 

 else but nuclei. This hypothesis is rendered the more plausible 

 by the fact that, in the uninucleate rhizopods, which have a large 

 nucleus, it rarely happens that the reaction of the carmine, even 

 under unfavourable conditions, fails to reveal that organ, while in 

 the plurinucleated species, in which the nuclei are small in 

 proportion as their number is greater, they are often with difficulty 

 distinguished. 



Bulinclla indica is at any rate almost beyond doubt a rhizopod, 

 the study of which in life could not fail to yield interesting 

 discoveries. 



If we recapitulate in a short diagnosis the characters of this 

 organism, they may be stated as follows : — 



