HISTORICAL SUMMARY. 3 



enumerated are some fossil types that must have been washed by the action of the sea and 

 of the streams from the neighbouring tertiary clays and sands, and thus have been mixed with 

 the recent shells in the mud and sands of the coast. The twenty-two forms which they 

 characterised as distinct species were for the most part referred by them to the genera 

 Nautilus and Serjnda ; but it is a curious exemplification of the ignorance then prevailing as 

 to the true characters of the lower tribes of animals, that Glohigerina bulloides should 

 actually have been referred by them to the genus Echinus, under the name of E. lohatulus. 

 All the forms recorded by these authors have been identified by the pains-taking inquiries of 

 Messrs. Parker and Rupert Jones (lxxvii). 



By far tlie most elaborate of all the older contributions to the study of Foraminifera were 

 contained in the works of Soldani (c, Qi) on the recent and fossil shells of the Mediterranean 

 and its shores. These works, the product of long-continued and careful research, added very 

 largely to the knowledge previously existing of the microzoic forms belonging to this group, 

 of which a vast number (many of them only entitled to rank as varieties) are figured, usually 

 with such accuracy as to admit of being at once recognised ; but from the Ijinomial nomen- 

 clature not having been adopted by the author, his materials were not rendered so available 

 as they might have been to subsequent systematists, and many of the types well figured and 

 described by him have received a multitude of synonyms at the hands of his successors. 



The British Foraminifera soon afterwards underwent a new scrutiny, on the part of a 

 most able concbologist, Colonel Montagu, who, in his ' Testacea Britannica' and its Supplement 

 (lxv), enumerated thirty-six species — the chief addition to those of Boys and Walker being 

 from the Milioline group, several species of which he described under the generic designation 

 Fermiculum, associating with them under the same designation several species of Lagena and 

 Entosolenia. It is evident that Montagu was much perplexed by the difliculty of defining 

 the limits of species in this group ; for in describing his Fermiculum intortum (now known 

 as one of the varieties of Miliola seminulum) he distinctly states tliat this is so variable in its 

 formation that without great attention it might be formed into several species. Yet, notwith- 

 standing the warning he might hence have drawn, he was unable to follow the authors next 

 to be noticed in their comprehensive grouping of widely divergent varieties ; for when 

 speaking in his Supplement of the numerous forms of Nautilus [Crist ellaria) calcar delineated 

 by MM. Fichtel and Moll, he remarks — " If these can be admitted to be the same species, we 

 may bid defiance to specific definition." The species described by Montagu have all been 

 identified by Messrs. Parker and Rupert Jones (lxxvii). 



Contemporaneously with the first publication of Montagu, a most important treatise by 

 MM. Fichtel and Moll, specially devoted to the minute Polythalamia (xlv), appeared at 

 Vienna. This treatise formed but a portion of a much larger work, which would have been 

 brought out by its authors if they had received sufficient encouragement to do so ; and it 

 includes only those forms which they ranked under the genus Nautilus. These — unlike the 

 forms described in the works of Walker and Montagu, which are, for the most part, dwarfed 

 by their northern habitats — are, generally speaking, large, well-grown specific types, mostly 

 from the Mediterranean area, but partly also from the Red Sea ; and they are so carefully 

 described, and so admirably figured, that the work will always remain a valuable standard of 

 reference in regard to the forms of which it treats. Its authors appear to have been strongly 

 impressed with the difficulty of defining species in this group, and they revert to the Linnean 



