250 NATURAL SCIENCE. APRIL, 
assistance to enable him to complete the work. When will the 
Palzontographical Society complete the monograph on our own 
Eocene Mollusca, left unfinished on the death of Messrs. Edwards 
and Wood? 
SEA PELLETs. 
In the February number of the Revue Générale de Botanique, W. 
Russell has an interesting note on these peculiar felt-like balls thrown 
up by the sea, or sometimes found on the shores of inland lakes. 
They occur in great abundance round the Mediterranean and seem 
to have puzzled the old naturalists. The Greeks knew of them, for 
Galen and Aristotle recommend the use of their ashes as a remedy 
for scrofula. Later, Constant and Cornarius placed them in the 
genus Alcyon, a group which, however, included sponges and corals 
as well as sea-weeds. Cesalpinius, in his ‘De Plantis” (1583) 
describes them as formed of the down of the sea, but Imperato, 
nearly a century later, refused to rank them as plants, more nearly 
recognising their true nature as ‘balls of chaffand hair made by the 
rolling of the sea,” and showing that they must not be confused with 
the hair-balls found in the stomach of goats and other ruminants. 
At the end of the iast century, Draparnaud found the pellets 
collected on the Mediterranean shores to be composed of fibres felted 
round a fragment of that curious marine flowering plant the sea- 
wrack (Zosteva), and, later on, Bory de St. Vincent described similar 
ones from the Straits of Dover. 
In 1857, Germain de Saint Pierre remarks on the spherical pellets 
of brown felted fibres found on the coast of Provence, and used by 
the hunters of the district as a wad for their guns, and finds that 
they consist “of fibres persisting on the stems of Posidomia Caulini 
after the destruction of the leaves, of which they represent the 
nerves.” 
Weddel, in 1867, explained their formation thus: The old root- 
stocks of the plant are torn into shreds and broken by the continual 
shock of the waves, while larger fragments rolled up and down the 
carpet of fibres, especially where the shore forms a gentle slope, catch 
them up, and become the nucleus of often very large balls. 
Frequently, however, the core is absent, as in many of the cases 
quoted by Russell from Italy, where they were usually spherical or 
ovoid, solidly felted and remarkably homogeneous, but sometimes 
fusiform with a rigid axis, easily recognisable as a fragment of the 
rhizome. The author goes on to describe some pellets collected in 
the Island of St. Marguerite, which he has found to consist of scales of 
pine cones in all degrees of alteration, some intact, others reduced to 
a few fibres, and numbers of filaments generally rather thick, and only 
5 or 6 centimetres long at the most, but mingled with others long and 
threadlike but less numerous. In the short filaments the bordered 
pits and resin canals characteristic of the pines were easily seen under 
