104 JOURNAL OF THE [October, 



fore in process of formation. A habit which seems to have been 

 so easily acquired, and especially a habit which must be so bene- 

 ficial to the animal, is not going to be forgotten nor abandoned. 

 Thus far there has been no tendency, in the hundred or more 

 colonies which I have seen, to produce other than an irregular 

 form in which the loricte are attached to one another by what 

 seems to be a haphazard arrangement, producing an unsymmet- 

 rical and ungraceful result. Yet in some of these larger colonies 

 there is also visible what it needed .but little acumen, in one 

 familiar with the appearance and the habit of this infusorial class, 

 to predict, adding still another feature of great interest to these 

 special, intermediate forms. In some of these collections of 

 irregularly adherent loricse or one two of the constituent animals 

 has actually secreted a minute, secondary pedicle by means of 

 which it is attached to the supporting lorica, be that the parent 

 sheath or that of a member of the cluster (see the lateral zooid in 

 Fig. 2). Here is a variety within a variety, and, if the apparent 

 desire to change continues, the secondary pedicle will become 

 a permanent feature, and the point of adherence will also be 

 changed from a point on another lorica to the top of the primary 

 pedicle, and another species will have been formed, or at least a 

 closely connecting, varietal link between the fresh -water Salpingoeca 

 gracilis and a salt-water representative which has not yet been 

 found, probably because, with the exception of James-Clark, no 

 microscopist in this country has paid the least attention to the 

 Choana-Flagellata of salt water. The field is entirely unoccupied, 

 and is at the disposal of any microscopist that is properly 

 equipped with objectives and so situated that he has access to 

 the ocean. 



But this is not all. If it was it would be interesting and sug- 

 gestive, at least to the writer; but there is more which is still more 

 surprising to the student of these special Infusoria. The animal 

 has actually made alterations in the mode of its reproduction, 

 thus adapting its manner of increase to its new and improved 

 manner of living- With nil other members of this group of ani- 

 mals, the reproduction is by the transverse fission of the parent's 

 body; the latter divides into two parts, the one remaining in 

 the old lorica, the other swimming off to find a new location 

 and there producing a new lorica. 'I he free-swimming portion 



