THE CAVE-DWELLING ANEMONE. 
97 
removed all the animals save one — the most valuable, — 
which could not be found, and which I concluded was the 
som-ce of the mischief. The vase stood, however, in an 
empty room till last Tuesday [April 20], — so you may guess 
the strength of the pickle, — when I emptied out the whole 
kettle of fish, and found Monsieur at the bottom. He is only 
the shadow of himself, and looks uncommonly seedy ; but 
is a character, nevertheless.” 
While ’writing this article, I have had an opportunity, for 
the first time, of seeing the discharge of true ova from an 
Anemone. In a saucer, containing a Corynactis and some 
varieties of troglodytes^ that was standing on my library 
table, I found, on the morning of the 28th of April, that 
there had been deposited during the night an even layer of 
pale brown substance on the bottom, so placed as to make 
it uncertain whether it had proceeded from the Corynactis 
or from one of the troglodytes. The mass was about as 
large as a fourpenny-piece. A little taken up with a 
pipette, and examined under a power of 500 diam., proved 
to be composed of ova, opaque, perfectly globular, varying 
from .0043 to .0051 inch (but the former was an unusually 
small one) : they were mostly very uniform in size, viz. 
.0050 inch. They had a clear well-defined edge, and not 
the slightest appearance of cilia. 
I removed the troglodytes to a clean part of the saucer (it 
was the beautiful orange var. auricoma), and after a few 
hours perceived that it was discharging more ova, which 
were streaming over its lower tentacles, as it lay on its side, 
but fully expanded. I therefore immediately transferred it 
to a straight-sided glass box for closer examination. 
As soon as it had expanded again after the shock of 
removal, which it did in a few minutes, I began to watch 
it. It was lying on its side, with its disk and expanded 
tentacles near the glass side, and facing my eye. Many of 
II 
