232 PROCEEDINGS OF THE ACADEMY OF [1887. 



in a bottle of water. There was nothing therefore in the fragments 

 themselves to convince me of their external form except the sugges- 

 tive presence of the broad bands of fasciculate skeleton sj^icules 

 referred to in the descrij^tion. 



Four years passed before I was able, by my own observations, to 

 verify the impression so vaguely gathered. It was during the last 

 week of September 1886 that I journeyed for the first time, to Gilder 

 Pond, with the primary object of determining the character of this 

 sponge. Primary but not sole, for no one familiar with the beauty 

 of the Berkshire Hills, would quite credit the assertion that even 

 the most enthusiastic naturalist could limit his enjoyment of them 

 to the act of gathering an insignificant sponge from a tarn upon the 

 mounlain side. 



No, I saw and enjoyed all that the summer tourist enjoys, the 

 sombre forests, the lichen-covered rocks; the mountain summits near 

 at hand, the wide extended view which each gave to its visitors. 

 I also climbed Mt. Everett, "the dome of the Taconics," and sat 

 alone, the center of an unbroken horizon, embracing hundreds of 

 square miles of such varied beauty as may well be the memory of a 

 life time; — but to all this was added the unspeakable charm of a 

 morning spent on the bosom of that little lake, shut in by the silent 

 woods, its flora and its fauna clearly revealed through the bright 

 waters below me. I will not believe that a scientific interest in 

 natural objects can lessen one's enjoyment of the sights and the 

 sounds, the scents and the colors that greet him ; the reviving touch 

 of the evening breeze or the exhilarant purity of this mountain air : 

 it adds, instead, a sixth sense, the hope or the joy of disco ver}^ 



I found the present species very abundant and others hardly 

 less so ; one of them I shall have occasion to describe hereafter. 

 M. everetti was widely spread over the bottom of the pond, not on 

 the mud however, the sedimentary alluvium that had gathered here 

 to a great depth ; but on the water- weeds and grasses, the. submerged 

 verdure, over which it had crawled in slender threads, reaching 

 from leaf to stem and from blade to leaf, as if some giant spider had 

 spun them ; but even more like the wavering, inconsequent trail left 

 by a snail or an earth-worm to mark its nightly wanderings. With 

 arm bared and fingers used as a rake, I could gather it plentifully ; 

 but its lines were so utterly flaccid that they at once became matted 

 and massed together so as to lose all individuality. Some, now in 

 the bottle at my side, were immersed almost immediately in alcohol, 

 which hardened and preserved it. 



