188 PROCEEDINGS OF SOCIETIES. 



Mueller describes it has a Clavaria. It will be important to learn if 

 it has made its appearance in any other part of the colony, and under 

 what circumstance as to crop, soil, and locality. 



And now with a view of encoui'aging microscopical students and 

 amateurs who, perchance, may be thinking that anything they can ever 

 do in the way of natural-history research must necessarily be of small 

 account, I would beg permission to cite one or two examples which, in 

 my humble judgment, should henceforth give them a stout heart fur 

 futui-e zaalous exertion. Who would expect to find an original, inde- 

 pendent, and successful marine natui'alist in a bustling London mer- 

 chant ? And yet, somewhat a little over a hundred years ago, one 

 John Ellis achieved in that character, in the great metropolis, an im- 

 perishable renown. He was fond of amusing himself in making imi- 

 tations of landscapes by the curious and skilful disposition of delicate 

 sea- weeds and corallines on paper; and it was this amusement that 

 directed his inquiries into the nature of the latter, for, says Dr. John- 

 ston, attracted by their beauty and neatness, he was induced to examine 

 them minutely with the microscope, by aid of which he immediately 

 perceived that they differed not less from each other in respect to their 

 form than they did in regard to their texture ; and that in many of 

 them this texture was such as seemed to indicate their being more 

 of an animal than of a vegetable nature. These suspicions, as he 

 modestly termed them, were communicated to the Eoyal Society of 

 London in June, 1752. And, encoui-aged by some of the members, he 

 prosecuted this inquiry, continues Dr. Johnston, with such ardour and 

 care and sagacity, that in August of the same year he had fully con- 

 vinced himself that these apparent plants were animals, in their proper 

 skins or cases, not locomotive, but fixed on oysters, mussels, and sea- 

 weeds. And in 1755 he published his famous essay towards a natural 

 history of the corallines and other marine productions of the like kind 

 found on the coast of Great Britain, a work, says the historian of the 

 British Zoophytes, so complete and accurate that it remains an un- 

 scared monument of his well-earned rei:)utation as a philosophical 

 inquirer. It is even to this day the principal source of our knowledge 

 in this dei)artment of natural history. The Koyal Society eventually 

 adjudged to Ellis its highest honour, in the shape of the Copley Medal, 

 for his most ingenious and accui-ate investigation, which forms an 

 epoch in the history of natural science. So much for the city man of 

 business. Now, for the emulation of teachers of youth, I will cite the 

 example of Abraham Trembley. He also made himself world-famous 

 in the middle of the last century by the production of a most remark- 

 able quarto volume of several hundi-ed jiages, a copy of which I hold 

 in my hand. It is in French, and consists wholly of the life history 

 of fresh-water polyps. The author was living about the year 1740 at 

 Sorglviet, at the chateau of the Count de Bentinck, with two pupils. 

 He one day happened to observe some minute creatures in the waters 

 of a pond in the neighbourhood, and his curiosity as to their nature 

 was excited. He cut one of them in two, and to his astonishment he 

 found that the separated parts became each an individual whole, and 

 that thus two creatures then existed where there had been only one 



