president's address. 205 



Reproduction, and Relation. The faculties of nutrition and 

 reproduction belong in common to animals and vegetables: 

 those of relation are essentially animal ; but in how slight a 

 degree they are enjoyed by the lowest types of animal life, he 

 proceeded to show. The most striking of the functions 

 of relation are those connected with what we term the senses — 

 seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling; and all these 

 faculties, together with special organs for locomotion and for the 

 prehension of food, we usually find developed, to a greater or 

 less extent, in animals. But Mr. Brady had to call upon his 

 audience to lay aside these ideas for a time, and be content to 

 recognise as an animal a being devoid of all these powers — a 

 minute atom of jelly, floating freely in water, without even a 

 skin — endowed with no special organ whatever — capable only of 

 extending portions of its gelatinous body into irregular thread- 

 like filaments, which, whilst extended, answer the double purpose 

 of assisting locomotion and seizing food — and, these duties 

 performed, coalescing again into an amorphous mass. Such is 

 the Amoeba — the proteus of animal life. Having considered this 

 gelatinous atom in its naked condition, as in the AmcehcBa, and 

 again, covered with a horny membrane, or sometimes a sandy 

 carapace, as in the Arcellina, it is easy to ascend one step more, 

 and we then find it provided with a symmetrical calcareous shell. 

 We cannot present in our pages the drawings and mountings by 

 which Mr. Brady showed how widely the various species of 

 Foraminifera differ in conformation and appearance. Some con- 

 sist of only a single cell or chamber; several have numerous 

 chambers arranged end to end in a single line ; in a third class, 

 this line of cells is rolled into a spiral form; another has the 

 same spiral arrangement, but consisting of two alternate rows of 

 cells ; two or three alternate rows also occur, but not spirally 

 coiled; another class has large chambers arranged down a longi- 

 tudinal axis ; and, lastly, some have the chambers arranged in 

 concentric rings. In almost every other division of Natural 

 History, the limitation of the area inhabited by particular species 

 is well defined ; frequently, to name a locality is to afford an 

 index to the specimen, and vice versa. But with the Foraminifera 



