246 NOTES ON MELICERTA RINGENS. 



It is most impoi-tant that students should know what a field 

 this and cognate rotifers offer for study, and that the subject is 

 very far from being exhausted. The question of the male alone is 

 nearly untouched, and, with high powers at command, it ought to 

 be a very productive and interesting subject. I was so fortunate as to 

 see what I believe was the male of Melicerta in last November. I was 

 examining a very fine female specimen, which was freely out and briskly 

 engaged, when from the tube there emerged a small free swimming 

 rotifer. In point of size it was not quite as long as one of the larger lobes 

 of the female ; the tube of the female in length would make about six 

 of it. It was very active, and it bent its body into most graceful and 

 rapidly changing curves ; its ciUary disk was totaUy unlike that of the 

 female, its tail also was wholly unlike the female's, for while the 

 female has a sucker foot to fix on to a weed, this specimen had a forked 

 tail, of which it made constant use, opening the forks like pincers to nip 

 the objects to which it attached itself. Its first action alone was 

 enough to beget the idea of its gender. It began to woo and caress the 

 lobes of the female in the most active and elegant manner ; it seemed 

 almost as if it was nibbling the main wreath of ciha of the female.* 



Now, to any one accustomed to watch Melicerta, it must bo always a 

 matter of astonishment to see such a timid, nervous rotifer allow another 

 to touch the cilia with impi^nity, but in this instance the female 

 never flinched in any way, but accepted the attentions of the httle 

 visitor with perfect composure, and continued to feed as if quite 

 undisturbed by its presence. The free rotifer almost immediately after- 

 wards sailed away, and I soon lost it, though not before I had seen 

 enough of it to conclude that had I met with it as a stranger, and not 

 known whence it came, I should have at once set it down for one of the 

 numerous members of the family Hydatinete. I regret to say here that 

 I have never contrived to attain to a knowledge of names — 

 at least in the rotifer world — and I have always estimated an 

 object above its name, and a fact above a new object. The desire of 

 being godfather to a new animal is apt to lead us into fruitless paths, 

 while the love of facts about old ones never does. 



Knowing Melicerta so well, I was quite sure she would not 

 have permitted such liberties as I had witnessed without good 

 cause. The mere circumstance of a rotifer making its appearance 

 from her tube was unusual, and a rotifer with a forked tail 

 doubly so. The ordinary female egg leaves the tube in a footless 

 and vei-y imperfectly developed condition, while Melicerta is not an 

 animal to allow strange rotifers to visit its tube without resentment. 

 The time of year struck me also as special, for I had never examined 

 Melicerta so late in the year before. Throughout last December and 

 January, I obtained specimens from Mr. Bolton, and broke the tubes up 

 to examine their contents, and I was so fortunate as to find ten more of 

 the same fi'ee swimming rotifer in about fifty tubes, and under circum- 

 stances which leave little doubt in my mind as to its nature and sex. I 



♦ The portrait of the supposed male of Melicerta tyro, giveu by Dr. Hudson 

 (M. M. J., vol. xiv., p. 225,) is very like the male here described. 



