130 NATURAL SCIENCE [August 
Germans elect to style it. Two of these small sketches exist in the 
Dresden picture gallery. It should also be remarked, that Von 
Biedermann gives a list of the known representations of the Dodo, 
numbering fourteen altogether. 
Dr Meyer pens a short note upon remains of Alcea impennis from 
Swedish deposits, including a left coracoid bone obtained at Greby in 
the province of Bohuslin, among fragments of pottery and bones of 
the ox, pig, and sheep. 
F inally, we must draw attention to the essay of Mr Voigt upon 
the love-notes of the Capercailzie or ‘Auerhahn’ (7Zetrao urogallus), 
and the Blackeock or ‘Birkhahn’ (Lyrurus tetrix), which he has 
taken the pains to set to musical notation; and to a remarkable 
variety of the common European Kinefisher (Alcedo ispida), which 
is admirably figured. The curious point about this specimen, which 
was procured upon the Rhine between Mainz and Worms, is that the 
plumage of the upper surface is half green and half deep blue, the 
two colours being equally distributed. H. A.M. 
SPONGE SPICULES 
MATERIALS FOR A MONOGRAPH OF THE Ascons. I, ON THE ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF 
THE Tain AND QUADRIRADI ATE SPICULES IN THE FAMILY CLATHRINIDAE. 
By E. A. Minchin, M. A, Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. Reprinted from the 
Guirioty Journal of Microscopical Science, n.s. vol. xl., pp. 469-587, pls. xxxviil.- 
xlii., January 1898. 
Mr MINcuIN is almost a social phenomenon. He was appointed 
nearly five years ago to an Oxford fellowship, after competitive 
examination in natural science. The formal theory of such fellow- 
ships is that they should fill, so to speak, the yolk-sac of an embryonic 
scholar in some branch of human knowledge, and provide him with 
the metabolic material known as gold. These haleyon years the 
fellow (theoretically) devotes to the. pursuit of his particular branch 
of knowledge; he has the oppor tunity to develop into a fully equipped 
investigator, and may be supposed in this process to have issued a 
considerable body of actual research. At the end of that period, on 
the aboriginal hypothesis as to the place of fellows in the universe, a 
patron should present the fellow to a fat country living, where, dwell- 
ing in the fear of God and the friendship of the squire, the endowed 
scholar should continue his studies. In the modern world, however, 
a fat country living is not the natural reward of successful investiga- 
tion. For this reason it happens, at least in Oxford, that the research 
fellow seldom does research. Sometimes he goes to the bar ; some- 
times to medicine; sometimes to commerce; sometimes he enters with 
ardour into the boarding-school industry, and becomes a useful man 
to his college. In any event it is almost an anachronism for him to 
devote the major part of his endowed time to research. How Mr 
Minchin can reconcile it with his own interests that he has fulfilled 
the plain purpose of a fellowship by giving up his time to research we 
cannot pretend to say, but the first part of the monograph now before 
us, and a series of earlier memoirs, are ample evidence as to the fact. 
The present memoir deals with points incidentally obtained in the 
course of Mr Minchin’s attempt to get materials for a complete mono- 
graph of the Ascons. For all sponge histolog gy he found it of import- 
ance to carry with him, when seeking for specimens, tubes containing 
