7^ 



ANDREWS. 



degrees, the filose activities seemed to drain off the egg's 

 energies and interfere with the course of development. If the 

 greater heat were continued, great sheets and webs of proto- 

 plasm, nearly all hyaline, were given off; and later, the eggs, 

 or cells, would be much distorted by displacement of even the 

 yolk-bearing areas. Variable quantities of displaced protoplasm 

 extended towards the membrane and adhered to this by means 

 of processes along which more matter took its way. Immature 

 eggs and eggs overfertilized seemed most prone to these orgies 

 of spinning, and in instances quite forgot any cellular destinies 

 in exhausting themselves by such fruitless activities. The 

 immature eggs were most markedly abnormal in filose ways. 

 Most observers have noticed a sort of shapelessness and even 

 amoeboid changes of form in such eggs. These protuberances 

 are seen with highest powers to be but the base of great webs 

 of filose activities. In mature and normal eggs the activities 

 do not cause the slightest change of optical seeming, except 

 that they emphasize, perhaps, the slightly granular look of the 

 surface and may have been up to this time mistaken for such 

 a condition.^ 



Even more remarkable from some points of view than the 

 activities of the cytoplasm just noted, were those of the polar 

 globules. 



[88] From the moment of their extrusion the polar globules 

 showed filose activities of their cytoplasmic substance, no less 

 marked than those of the q.^^% cytoplasm ; and usually in more 

 or less intimate connection with these latter. They retained 

 these activities until time of closure of the cleavage pore when 

 they were drawn, or migrated, inside the blastula, and there 

 retained their social union with the ectoderm filaments until 

 formation of the endoderm processes and, still later, of the 

 mesenchyme web, when they could sometimes still be detected 

 in union with this also. 



Their chromatic substance preserved all the while a most 

 sharply marked and characteristic optical appearance, though 



1 The fact that even in these strongly emphasized abnormal cases the spinning 

 activities have not been described, points to the reasonableness of believing that 

 the finer, less obvious filaments of the normal eggs have been overlooked also. 



