60 Reviews and Notices of Books, 



11. The same question as to tlie latitude and longitude of prin- 

 cipal places inland. 



N. B. — It is requested that the answers maybe sent on a sepa- 

 rate sheet prefixing to each the number of the question in this 

 paper. 



EEVIEWS AND NOTICES OF BOOKS. 



Contributions to the Natural History of the United States, hy 

 Louis Agassiz. Vol, 3. 



This volume is more than a worthy successor to the two pre- 

 vious. The author is here completely on his own ground, and 

 dealing with a group of animals peculiarly requiring such labour 

 as he can perform better than any other naturalist, at least on 

 this continent. 



All dwellers by the sea side or visitors thereto, know the curi- 

 ous "jelly fishes" that swim lazily on the calm summer sea, or 

 are cast on the shore by the storms of autumn. Yet few know 

 the complex structures, the strange transformations, the peculiar 

 habits of these little masses of living jelly, so delicate that they 

 cannot be touched without injury, and having so little solid mat- 

 ter in their composition, that when dried on the beach they 

 leave a mere pellicle on the sand. 



Look for instance at the great blue jelly fish — the Cyanea 

 Arctica of our shores, of which in the work before us, a series 

 of admirable portraits is given. There it floats, six inches or a 

 foot in diameter, its flat purple disk looking like a mould of jelly 

 cast into the sea, but slowly and regularly contracting and expand- 

 ing as the creature urges its way along. Behind trails a long 

 tassel of red tentacles, capable of benumbing and entangling in 

 their meshes any unwary fish, crustacean or mollusk, that may come 

 in their way, and from the blistering properties of the poisoned 

 thread or lasso cells with which they are filled, not harmless to 

 thin skinned bathers. In the ^dst of the tentacles hangs the 

 proboscis, expanding into a multitude of complex labial processes 

 like frills of most delicate membrane ; and at the base of the prob- 

 oscis are the ovaries laden with the germs of a numerous progeny. 

 A most singular creature truly, and presenting in its minute 

 structures peculiarities quite as wonderful as in its external form j 



