SELECTED NOTES. 287 



and go on eating all the time, I confess utterly seems to me to 

 confound the power of imagination. You want not merely a 

 pellet organ ; that is nothing. You want a set of setae at the back 

 of the head, and a pair of hooks on each side of them ; a move- 

 able nose to pinch the brick against the chin and lay it on the 

 wall, the cushion to direct and an apparatus to guide the materials, 

 a cleft in each side of the pellet organ to conduct them, and the 

 intelligence (or say improved ' vital force ') to use all the apparatus 

 when you have got it, a.nd make it work as one machine. Even 

 with Limnias to help me, still the last form of apparatus I should 

 have dreamt of reaching would have been such a one as that before 

 us. As to whether it can be reached by degradation I know not ; 

 but I confess myself unable to see how it is impossible to evolve 

 it out of anything less advanced in organisation than itself — at any 

 rate, by any process which does not end in first creating and 

 dropping out a score of intermediate non-existent forms just at the 

 very point where we most want their presence and have a right to 

 expect their existence, and where the actual existence of so many, 

 and the extremely favourable and established conditions under 

 which the development has been going on fully entitle us to 

 require the non-existence of the others to be strictly accounted 

 for." F. BossEY. 



[We hope shortly to be able to reproduce the entire text of 

 this exceedingly interesting article, together with the two plates by 

 which it is accompanied. — Ed^ 



Melicerta ringens.— The building of a tube by Melicerta ringens 

 is, perhaps, one of the most interesting things to be seen in " Pond 

 Life." I have watched the preparation of the " Brick " in the 

 cell from the moment of the last brick being laid until the new one 

 was placed in its position, and I am decidedly of opinion that it is 

 either globular or cylindrical in shape. It is kept rotating in its 

 round cell the whole time of its formation, and the shape as seen 

 in the tube is probably due, like the cells of the honeycomb, to 

 mutual pressure of the soft bricks. F. J. Skelton. 



The Plates and Hairs in the Jerusalem artichoke are very 

 similar to those of the beautiful Borago Zeyia?nca from Mauritius, 

 and are very striking ; but I question whether they are siliceous ; 



