Mr. William Ingrams—Diatomacee. 45 
10.—DIATOMACE&. 
By Wittiam INnGRAMs. 
[Read May 21st, 1879.] 
Patience, I have heard more than once, is a virtue which 
few women are possessed of and no men. Whether this be 
so or not is a matter that can be settled by each individual for 
himself. -The subject for this evening is one that requires 
great patience, and I could not write a paper on it without 
much consideration as to the method of treating it. It is a 
subject that has engaged the attention of the finest minds; 
volumes have been written on it; and from these volumes, in 
which the subject is discussed in a most able manner, one 
might have put together a paper which would have been 
thought a tolerably fair exposition of the subject. Such a 
course, however, would, I am satisfied, have caused disappoint- 
ment to some; and hereafter, perhaps, expressions manifesting 
the absence of the great virtue from others. 
Gentlemen, be good enough to read the books in which the 
subject is discussed. You can do this at your leisure. In the 
short time I have at my disposal, I prefer rather for the sake 
of the younger members of the Club, to give you such a paper 
as will, I trust, result in an enthusiastic and persevering course 
of systematic study of—not books merely, but of the great 
book which an omniscient Creator has left open for the 
perusal of all who have eyes to see. 
Some years since my attention was arrested by the marvel- 
lous beauty of some of the diatomaceous forms. This was 
followed by a desire to know something of the nature of such 
remarkable organisms, and, if possible, to have slides of my own 
which would serve to indicate the part which such exceedingly 
minuteforms played in the great cosmical laboratory. My first 
efforts were presumptuous. I began with guano. Some slides 
were mounted containing many varieties ; others—specimens 
picked out according to books with a bristle from the shaving 
brush. All were beautiful; but I was sometimes not a little 
mortified that I could not, to my own satisfaction, in answer to 
the oft-repeated question, ‘‘ What are they?” say more than, 
‘Well, some say they are the solid parts of very small plants, 
and others the solid parts of very small animals. They were 
obtained from guano. Guano is the excrement of sea birds, 
deposited on the mountains of the western coast of America.”’ 
As a rule, these answers were satisfactory to all but myself. 
One had read of the philosophical reasonings of Owen on 
