100 
SAGAETIADiE. 
With a pipette I took up a drop from one of the diffusing 
clouds, and submitted it to the microscope. It was filled 
with millions of excessively minute, but vigorously motile 
atoms, clear and colourless, having an ovate body, and a 
slender tail, which wriggled their little tails, and rapidly 
oscillated from side to side, from the tail-tip as a yoint 
d'ajjpui. This was the first time I had ever seen the sper- 
matozoa (for such they assuredly were) of the Anemones. 
The next morning, the water still continuing turbid, I 
was about to pour it away, when I saw beneath the spot 
where the Anemone had lain, a thick layer of cream- 
colom’ed soft substance, well-defined in its outline. I took 
up a little of this and examined it. It proved to be a mass 
of ova. They agreed with those above described, being 
mostly quite globular (though a few were distorted) ; the 
majority closely alike in size, viz. .0058 inch ; but a few 
were manifestly smaller, and measiwed from .0046 to .0048 
inch. They were perfectly defined, with a distinct clear 
wall, and olive granular contents. 
When crushed with a graduated pressure to rupture, the 
whole contents of each ovum were seen to consist of a vitelline 
mass of minute oil-particles in an albuminous fluid, inclosed 
in a very thin vitelline membrane. In a few instances I 
detected the germinal vesicle with its germinal spot, some- 
times by its clearness when the ovum was flattened, some- 
times by its escape as a clear bladder from the ruptured 
membrane : but in many examples I could not find it at all. 
I removed the Anemone from the vase, leaving the ova 
alone, in hope that they would develop, but they all 
decomposed. 
I may add, that since then I have seen the like discharge 
of spermatozoa from a specimen of viduata. 
I refer with hesitation the Actinia elegans and A. ex- 
plorator of Sir John Dalyell to this species. The former 
