ORGANISMS FROM THE RECENTLY DISCOVERED ROMAN BATH. I9QI 
Davaine in 1859 first clearly pointed out their vegetable character, 
yet there are many difficulties in the way of assigning to them 
their true place in nature, and of correctly estimating their physio- 
logical importance ; and so long as our knowledge is confined 
chiefly to their vegetative system, and their reproductive system is 
either absent or imperfectly known, we must be content to look to 
the observers of the future for that fulness of knowledge which 
alone can satisfy. 
ORGANISMS FROM THE, RECEN TEY 
DISCOVERED ROMAN BATH. 
By R. H. Moore.* 
N the Roman bath recently laid open to the city, the greater 
interest has centered in its archeological character—the 
lesser interest I am desirous to evoke this evening. As we gaze 
upon its noble fragments of architectural columns, its broken altar, 
its fine series of steps, and its substantial ambulatory, the imagina- 
tion pictures former scenes of activity and enjoyment among 
an intruding race of men, which is in marked contrast with the 
present desertion and ruin of this once favoured spot. But so soon 
as desertion commenced and decay became apparent, Nature’s deft 
fingers supplied the vacuum, and amid the ruins of man’s industry 
she grasped the situation, and the site which had been busy with 
the haunts of man, and cheerful with the hum of conversational 
delight, became a world of tiny molluscs and waving rushes, land 
and water teeming with real but less apparent life. The remnants 
of this subsequent life I am desirous to bring before the society 
this evening. During the excavations on the site of the Roman 
bath last year, our fellow member, Mr. Bartrum, who was then 
Mayor of the city, introduced me to a bank of mud resting upon 
the floor of the bath, and situated immediately under the Poor-law 
Offices. From this bank of firm mud the organisms which I shall 
bring before you were selected. It was from eight to nine feet 
deep, and made up of clearly defined strata. At the bottom, upon 
the floor of the bath, lay the broken Roman tiles which once 
covered its roof, and thus all that was found above them must have 
been the accumulations of the centuries which intervened between 
the departure of the Romans and the decay of their noble work, 
and the more modern times when buildings became erected on the 
*A paper read before the Bath Microscopical Society. 
