250 NATURAL SCIENCE. April, 



assistance to enable him to complete the work. When will the 

 Palaeontographical Society complete the monograph on our own 

 Eocene Mollusca, left unfinished on the death of Messrs. Edwards 

 and Wood? 



Sea Pellets. 



In the February number of the Revue Genevale de Botaniqiie, W. 

 Russell has an interesting note on these peculiar felt-like balls thrown 

 up by the sea, or sometimes found on the shores of inland lakes. 

 They occur in great abundance round the Mediterranean and seem 

 to have puzzled the old naturalists. The Greeks knew of them, for 

 Galen and Aristotle recommend the use of their ashes as a remedy 

 for scrofula. Later, Constant and Cornarius placed them in the 

 genus Alcyon, a group which, however, included sponges and corals 

 as well as sea-weeds. Cesalpinius, in his " De Plantis " (1583) 

 describes them as formed of the down of the sea, but Imperato, 

 nearly a century later, refused to rank them as plants, more nearly 

 recognising their true nature as " balls of chaff and hair made by the 

 rolling of the sea," and showing that they must not be confused with 

 the hair-balls found in the stomach of goats and other ruminants. 



At the end of the last century, Draparnaud found the pellets 

 collected on the Mediterranean shores to be composed of fibres felted 

 round a fragment of that curious marine flowering plant the sea- 

 wrack (Zosteva), and, later on, Bory de St. Vincent described similar 

 ones from the Straits of Dover. 



In 1857, Germain de Saint Pierre remarks on the spherical pellets 

 of brown felted fibres found on the coast of Provence, and used by 

 the hunters of the district as a wad for their guns, and finds that 

 they consist " of fibres persisting on the stems of Posidonia Caiilini 

 after the destruction of the leaves, of which they represent the 

 nerves." 



Weddel, in 1867, explained their formation thus: The old root- 

 stocks of the plant are torn into shreds and broken by the continual 

 shock of the waves, while larger fragments rolled up and down the 

 carpet of fibres, especially where the shore forms a gentle slope, catch 

 them up, and become the nucleus of often very large balls. 



Frequently, however, the core is absent, as in many of the cases 

 quoted by Russell from Italy, where they were usually spherical or 

 ovoid, solidly felted and remarkably homogeneous, but sometimes 

 fusiform with a rigid axis, easily recognisable as a fragment of the 

 rhizome. The author goes on to describe some pellets collected in 

 the Island of St. Marguerite, which he has found to consist of scales of 

 pine cones in all degrees of alteration, some intact, others reduced to 

 a few fibres, and numbers of filaments generally rather thick, and only 

 5 or 6 centimetres long at the most, but mingled with others long and 

 threadlike but less numerous. In the short filaments the bordered 

 pits and resin canals characteristic of the pines were easily seen under 



