150 PROGRESS OF MICROSCOPICAL SCIENCE. 
the American zoologists. A writer says, as regards Bathybius, which 
is now again attracting notice, more however in clerical than in 
scientific circles, it may be said that while Professors Wyville Thom- 
son and Huxley have been inclined to doubt whether this is an organ- 
ism, Dr. Bessels, of the ‘Polaris’ expedition, discovered in Smith’s 
Sound a form almost exactly like Bathybius, which, however, he judged 
to be still simpler than” Bathybius, and accordingly named Proto- 
bathybius. A description and a figure of it are given from drawings 
and notes furnished by the author in Packard’s ‘Life Histories of 
Animals.’ Even if Bathybius should prove to be inorganic, we have 
Protobathybius Robesonii left, and several allied forms of simple 
Monera, such as Protameba protegenes, and others, which are simple 
drop-like masses of protoplasm, even without a nucleus. All these 
animals or plants, it matters not which, but most probably the former, 
are placed by Haeckel in his Monera, a division of organisms adopted 
by Huxley in a recent paper. 
A novel form of Epithelioma is described in an article on the sub- 
ject in the ‘Cincinnati Medical News’ for December. The writer, 
Dr. W. C. Dabney, says that there can be no doubt that the great 
majority of physicians engaged in general practice, who use the 
microscope at all, look upon the nest-like arrangement of epithelial 
cells as characteristic of cancer, and generally of the ‘“ epithelial ” 
variety, so-called. This is the teaching of those works on patholo- 
gical histology which are most used in America, and such were the 
views which he had been led to adopt in consequence, till a few 
months ago, when, on examination of an ordinary wart removed 
from the penis, he found a nest of cells, which he could in no way 
distinguish from those known to occur so commonly in epithelial 
cancer. The little growth was about the size of a large English pea, 
and was attached to the prepuce by a broad pedicle. On removing it, 
and making a section parallel with the little papilla of which it 
seemed to consist, he found it to be composed of epithelial cells, 
which had, in most parts of the section, no definite arrangement, but 
at quite a number of points they were arranged in nests which were 
composed generally of flattened cells on the outside, with globular 
ones in the centre, while beyond the limits of these nest-like arrange- 
ments the cells were of irregular shape, and had, as previously stated, 
no definite arrangement. The whole tumour seemed to be composed 
of cells, and there were no cylinders to be found—it being, in this 
respect, entirely unlike the generality of epithelial cancers. A careful 
examination of a number of sections taken from this papillary new 
formation, and a comparison instituted between them and sections 
from an epithelial cancer of the lip, has not enabled him to observe 
any difference in the structure of the “nests” in the two growths; 
and the chief difference, so far as he could determine, was the absence 
of the “ cylinders” so frequently found in epithelioma. 
How the two eyes of a flounder come to the same side—Mr. Alexander 
Agassiz has just published a most interesting fact in natural science. 
He thus describes the process by which the young flounder which first 
