80 JOURNAL OF THE [March, 



MISCELLANEA. 



Royal Microscopical Society, Annual Meeting, February 

 nth, 1885: Extracts from Report in English Mechmiic. — Dr. 

 Maddox exhibited some specimens of Dr. Miguel's improved 

 nutritive lichenised paper for the registration and cultivation of 

 atmospheric and other bacteria, and gave the following particu- 

 lars of the method used to color the organisms after incubation. 

 The sterilised nutritive paper charged with the lichen jelly is, 

 after use, placed in the incubator for the cultivation of the mi- 

 crobes. It is afterwards put into a saturated solution of alum 

 for five minutes, then washed, and placed in a bath of sulphate 

 of indigo (two grammes to one litre of water) for thirty seconds, 

 again washed, and put into a bath of permanganate of potash (two 

 grammes to 1,000 of water), for thirty to sixty seconds. The 

 paper, now of a rose color, is washed, and immersed for half a 

 minute in a three per cent, solution of oxalic acid, by which the 

 paper becomes bleached, while the organisms are shown of a 

 very distinctly blue color. 



In the Report of the Council was included the following item : 

 The Council have voted five pounds five shillings to the memo- 

 rial now being raised in America to the late R. B. Tolles, one 

 of the earliest to appreciate, not merely the theoretical, but the 

 practical, bearing of the immersion system in allowing of the in- 

 crease of the aperture of an objective beyond that of a dry ob- 

 jective of 180 degrees, which it was so long supposed to be im- 

 possible to exceed. 



The President addressed the Society on the subject of the 

 life-history of a sceptic organism hitherto unrecorded. The fol- 

 lowing is an abstract : — 



Commencing with a review of the position of bacteria and 

 monads in biology. Dr. Dallinger went on to remark that who- 

 ever had studied the same field of septic bacteria for a week or 

 a fortnight without change of conditions would know the strange 

 complexity of relations that are seen to arise, and until this com- 

 plexity of relations in common forms was understood assured 

 progress was impossible. How the bacteria are inter-related, 

 how far they are mutable and under what conditions, and whether 

 functional changes are as readily, or more readily, induced than 

 morphological changes visibly perceptible, were questions of the 



