ON .MEKLiA xo r:\ian I. 657 



On Merlia Dorniani,a Sponge with a Siliceous 

 and Calcareous Skeleton. 



R. Kirkpatrick. 



With Plates 32-38 and 5 Text-fio-ures. 



A GOOD deal of the work in connection with the following 

 investigation was done at the Lister Institute, in the labora- 

 tory of Professor E. A. Minchin, and I take this opportunity 

 of thanking- him for the continual help and instruction which 

 he very kindly gave me in methods of technique. 



Also I would express my sincere thanks to Senhor A. C. 

 Noronha, who accompanied me to Porto Santo to help with 

 dredgiag for Merlia. 



Most of the drawings have been done by Mr. P. Highley, 

 who has put them on stone. The drawings of young stages 

 of Merlia on PI. 38 and figs. 1-4 on PI. 36 were done by 

 Miss Rhodes. 



In 1908 Canon Norman, who had been working out the 

 Polyzoa of Madeira, sent to the Natural History Museum four 

 small, dried, incrusting calcareous organisms resembling 

 Polyzoa. The crusts were about a square centimetre in area, 

 and a milliuietre or less in thickness. They had been detached 

 from a small mass of calcareous conglomerate hooked up by a 

 fisherman from sixty fathoms off Porto Santo island, about 

 twenty miles N.E. of Madeira. 



The specimens Avere covered with a thin yellow pellicle 

 stretching across a white calcareous network, with very 

 minute polygonal meshes, and with small rough tubercles 

 rising from the nodes and pushing up the pellicle. A vertical 



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