116 WESTON, ON THE ACTINOPHRYS SOL. 



fibre, which is undergoing fatty degeneiTition. At p. 217 

 he mentions rusty brown granular pigment in muscular fibrils, 

 which have lost their striae, and in the atrophied muscles 

 of a stump after amputation. 



I hope to resume the subject in some future number of the 

 Microscopical Journal. 



Oji the AcTiNOPHRYs Sol. By J. Weston, Esq., H.E.I.C. 



Having during the last two or three months met with a plen- 

 tiful supply of Actinojihrys Sol, and fortunately also a most 

 unusual deficiency of professional calls upon my time, I have 

 been enabled to pay these little creatures considerable atten- 

 tion, not, I hope, quite fruitlessly, since the description I am 

 about to give of some of their peculiar habits will, I think, be 

 novel. 



I would premise, that as my knowledge of the microscope 

 is in its infancy (something less than two years old), my ob- 

 servations will be confined mostly to ivhat I Jtave actually 

 seen and shown to some of my friends, leaving deductions to 

 older hands and abler heads. 



I regret that I shall have to call in question the correct- 

 ness of descriptions given by previous writers ; but as I " pin 

 my faith on no man's sleeve," and have rather a method of 

 looking and thinking for myself, I shall fearlessly state what 

 the instrument has revealed, much of which differs so mate- 

 rially from a Paper on the same creature in the 1st volume of 

 the Journal, that I am led to imagine the writer and myself 

 have been observing a different species. 



In the first place, then, as there appears to be doubt about 

 the existence of a valvular opening, I have had some thousands 

 of these animalcules under my observation, and have never 

 met with a specimen where the valve was absent. It is best 

 distinguished when about the edge of the seeming disc, and 

 so far as my observations go, is never still night nor day ; being 

 slowly, but without cessation, as it were, protruded, occupying 

 from ten to seventy or eighty seconds in its development, and 

 then, like the bursting of a vesicle, rapidly and totally sub- 

 siding ; for an instant it has utterly disappeared, only to be 

 again as gradually and as certainly reproduced. Should that 

 side of the creature, where the valve is placed, be turned from 

 the observer, the effects of the contraction are distinctly seen, 

 although the valve itself is not, for at the instant of its burst- 



