1915] Beauty, Design and Purpose in the Foraminifera 473 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 



Friday, May 21, 1915. 



Sm James Crichton-Browxe, M.D. LL.D. D.Sc. F.R.S. Treasurer 

 and Ylce-President, in the Chair. 



Edwaed Heron-Allex, F.L.S. F.G.S. F.R.M.S. 



On Beauty, Design and Purpose in the Foraminifera. 



Ix the Dawn of History the Tartars in their flight before the 

 victorious army of Ladislaus, King of Transylvania, scattered money 

 as they fled, trusting to the apparently already established instincts 

 of the Teuton soldiers that their pursuit would be thereby arrested. 

 But King Ladislaus prayed that this money might be turned into 

 stones, and his prayer was immediately granted. Hence the 

 Nummuhtes (SI. 1).^ This, at any rate, is the account given of the 

 matter in the 16th century by the learned Clusius,"' and it is 

 probably the first mention of the Foraminifera in print. The 

 equally learned Strabo, however, had recorded that the Egyptian 

 Nummulites were the petrified remains of beans left behind them by 

 the builders of the Pyramids,-^ in spite of the explicit statement of 

 Herodotus that the Egyptians never grew or ate beans in any form.-^ 

 This Nummulite, which rightfully claims to be the earliest recorded 

 Foraminifer, is also the highest and most complex of its Order 

 (SI. 2), and it was based upon his study of this Family that 

 Dr. Carpenter in 1885 claimed for the Foraminifera that they are 

 the most highly specialized and structurally developed of the 

 Protozoa.5 "They stand at the summit of a long branch of the 

 whole tree of life," ^ and have with perhaps the single exception of 

 the Globigerinidae, played a more important part in the building up 

 of vast tracts of the Earth's surface than any other organism. The 

 Nummulitic Limestones (SI. 3) stretch in a broad band, in many 



^ A list of the slides exhibited will be found at the end of the Discourse. 



- Caroli Clusii et aliorum epistolae, Ep. xxxvii. Paris (c. 1550). 



2 Strabo, Geographica, bk. xvii. cap. i. 34. 



* Herodotus, Euterpe, ii. 37. 



' W. B. Carpenter, On the Structure of Orbitolites. Journ. Quekett Micr. 

 Club, ser. 2, vol. ii. p. 102. 



^ P. Chalmers Mitchell, Art. " Evolution " in Encycl. Britannica, 11th ed. 

 vol. X. p. 35. 1910. 



