Monthly Microscopican /■ 0^11 ^ 



Journal, May 1, 1870. J V ^'-'J- ) 



PEOGEESS OF MICEOSCOPICAL SCIENCE. 



Italian Fossil Bryozoa. — At the meeting of the Vienna Academy, 

 on the 10th of March, Dr. Eeuss presented the fourth j)art of Dr. 

 Manzoni's 'Italian Fossil Bryozoa.' It contains the description of 

 twenty-four species of chilostomous bryozoa, of which two belong to 

 each of the genera Salicornaria, Hij^pothoa, and Eschara ; one to each 

 of the genera Lepralia, Eetepora, Lunulites, and Cnj)ularia ; six to 

 the family Cellepora ; and, lastly, eight to the Membranipora. Nine 

 of them are quite new. The species described occurred partly in the 

 Pliocene of Calabria and Castellarquato, partly in the Miocene of 

 Turin, and other places. At the conclusion of the paper the author 

 is led to notice three species of cyclostomous bryozoa, and through 

 this to comment on the general zoological value of many genera 

 founded only on the different arrangement of the tube-cells. 



Staining Dental Tissues. — A recent number of the American ' Dental 

 Cosmos ' contains an interesting paj^er on this subject by Mr. J. S. 

 Latimer, in which he gives the result of various exj^eriments with 

 Dr. Beale's carmine solution, and points out results which support 

 Dr. Beale's theory of " germinal matter." 



The Microscope in the Examination of Meteorites. — In a paper lately 



read before the Eoyal Society, Professor Maskelyne gave an account 



of his microscopic observations on the Busti Aerolite. Sjjeaking of 



the presence of augite in the mineral, he says that associated with it 



throughout, and otherwise forming the chief mass of the stone, is a 



mineral which, in microscopic sections, presents the appearance of 



a number of more or less fissured crystals of varying transj)arency, 



some clear, some nearly opaque, and usually jiresenting a not very 



unsymmetrical polygonal outline. Those crystals are imbedded in a 



magma of fine-grained silicate, itself often entangled in an irregular 



meshwork of opaque white mineral. Amongst these ingredients, when 



mechanically separated, what seems to be three different minerals can 



be distinguished. The rarest of them is transparent and colouidess, 



and very irregular in the form of its fragments ; a second is of a 



greyish-white colour, translucent, and offering an even less hopeful 



problem to the crystallographer than that j)resented by the fii'st. The 



third is an opaqiie mineral with a distinct cleavage following the faces 



88 ■ 35 

 of a prism of about _ , and with a second imperfect cleavage per- 



J A. ' A t 



p'endicular to the former. From a few fragments of the two former 

 kinds some measurements were obtained, which conduct to the con- 

 clusion that, like the last-mentioned silicate, these minerals are 

 enstatite. 



Tlie Development of Echini. — The ' Bulletin of the Museum of 

 Zoology,' No. 9, contains an account of the results of the deep-sea 

 dredgings between Cuba and Florida, and includes Mr. A. Agassiz's 



