226 Report of the Microscopical Section. [Sess. 



of water-fleas, the archaic Apits, the modern representative of 

 some extinct ancestor of the Crustacea. In fact, last winter 

 we visited often what might be looked upon as a historic 

 picture-gallery, where we saw representations of the ancestors 

 of great races : we had a king crab, representing its relatives 

 the trilobites ; and we examined carefully one of the most 

 interesting of animals, which connects the annelids with the 

 centipedes and millepedes, — these in turn leading to simple 

 windess " white fish," the most ancient of insects. The 

 ancestral form of animal life which delighted us so much 

 was the Pcripatus. It makes all the difference in the world 

 to read about a thing, or to see something in a glass bottle in 

 a glass case, and to handle it and put it under the microscope 

 oneself ; and so that hour spent with the Peripahis in our 

 hands left a lasting impression in our minds. 



Insects are so very numerous, both individually and in 

 kind^ — they have such interesting life-histories and mental 

 powers, — that Field Naturalists should know something about 

 them, almost above all other organisms, and so we devoted 

 several evenings to the study of Insect anatomy, beginning 

 with the cockroach and going on to some others. 



We had an instructive evening on the Amphioxtis : we went 

 over the rough anatomy carefully, and were shown how to 

 remove the nervous system virtually entire by steeping an 

 Amphioxus in 10 per cent nitric acid and shaking it. We 

 examined the notochord and other structures, and pictured to 

 ourselves the shapes they took in higher forms of life. 



Our last evening was spent in a fascinating way over bones. 

 There was a significance and life put into that usually very 

 dry subject. We understood from their development some- 

 thing of their structure and functions. We could see how 

 important it was for the organism to economise waste- 

 products for its advantage, — consider the case of a worm, the 

 exoskeleton of a lobster, the wing of an insect, the skeleton of 

 a vertebrate. It would not be too much to say that it is 

 by using up waste-products that the organism is protected and 

 built up for higher things. 



In this report I have avoided the details of our work, the 

 most of which is to be found in ordinary text-books. The 

 chief function of the Microscopical Section is practical nature- 



