130 ARCHER, ON STEPHANOSPH#RA PLUVIALIS. 
animal indication; it is now well known that the active 
spores of many undoubted algze possess this red dot; nay, 
some unicellular plants, whose whole life seems to be passed 
in a still condition, very beautifully exhibit this character- 
istic. There was a time when the presence of a “con- 
tractile vesicle’ was looked upen as an animal character- 
istic; but this too shows itself in plants—for instance, 
Gonium. There was a time when contractility, though 
merely indicating itself by a capacity of altering relative 
length and breadth, or of taking and recovering an external 
impression, was regarded as purely an animal mark ; but 
many vegetable cells (zoospores) possess it. There was a ‘time 
when the presence of starch was regarded as a strictly vege- 
table characteristic; but this product has been found in the 
animal kingdom—for instance, Amceba. And yet, so far as 
I know, there are but few of the organisms exhibiting any 
of these puzzling or apparently contradictory phases just 
alluded to which the most experienced observers have lately, 
merely on that account, thought fit to remove in their con- 
ceptions from the one kingdom to the other. I pass by the 
futile and uncalled-for efforts of some to form an intermediate 
kingdom between the animaland the vegetable kingdom. 
And surely, then, it appears to me, if certain organisms in the 
one kingdom in the course of their life- history temporarily 
undergo or simulate those phases which I have alluded to 
more especially characteristic of some organisms belonging 
to the other kingdom, it is, perhaps, at least not more sur- 
prising, after all, that a strictly vegetable cell should assume 
temporarily an amoeboid condition. It appears to me that 
not one of these contradictory temporary phases seems in the 
least to prove the actual and essential convertibility of an 
organism belonging to one kingdom into the other. It is 
quite true, indeed, ‘that any one looking at one of my ame- 
boid bodies for the first time, and knowing nothing of its 
origin, could hardly but believe that it was a true Ameba, 
but so peculiar and distinct, even at first sight, as that 
it could not be mistaken (so far as I can see) for any de- 
scribed Ameeba, but would naturally have been looked 
upon as a new species. But all misconception as to these 
points becomes altogether done away with, and any such 
assumptions become wholly set aside, when we know that 
it was no Ameeba at all, but only an ameeboid state of 
the vegetable Stephanosphzera a; and had it been so described 
by any one as a new Amoeba, in ignorance of its nature, it 
is probable that, some time or other, as the result of subse- 
quent observation, it would, as a species, have shared the fate 
