802 LEICESTER LITERARY SOCIETY. 



Of the Trausactions in this form, four parts have been issued, 

 inchTcIing the fifteen sessions from 1835 to 1850, giving abstracts of a 

 large number of pa^Ders, many of them of great local interest. 



The Society was never more vigorous and flourishing than it is at 

 the present moment. It has about 300 members subscribing a guinea 

 each, about twenty lady associates subscribing half a guinea, and about 

 twenty-five honorary members, all except one residing at a distance. Its 

 sectional committees, established in 1819 for the pursuit of special 

 branches of Art and Science, but most of which remained for many years 

 in a dormant state, are wakening into real hfe. The Council have under- 

 taken several additional courses of educational lectures for the general 

 benefit of the town, as well as the members. The Corporation have 

 recently pro%aded, partly by public subscription, and i)artly from the 

 borough estate, a new block of buildings in connection with the Museum, 

 in which a veiy handsome Lecture Hall, seating 500 persons, is devoted 

 to the use of the Society, and there can be little doubt that when the 

 Midland Union holds its annual meeting in Leicester next May, it will 

 receive a very warm and hearty welcome from the Literary and 

 Philosophical Society, under the auspices of its President for the year, 

 George Stevenson, Esq., who is one of its oldest and most valued 

 members, an Alderman, and an ex-Mayor of the borough. 



NOTE ON (ECISTES PILULA. 



At the meeting of the Birmingham Natural History and 

 Microscopical Society, held June 11th, 1878, (see "Midland NaturaUst" 

 at p. 202,) I exhibited the very rare Hotiiev Melicerta jiilula, or, more 

 correctly, (Ecistes pilula, which I had then just found in Sutton Park. 

 The history of this species appears to be as follows : — In the journal of 

 the Quekett Club, 1868, this animal was described by Mr. J. G. Tatem as 

 a variety of Melicerta, in which " only rudely shaped excrementitious 

 masses adherent to the gelatinous investment ai-e observed," but no 

 distinctive specific name was suggested for it. This description was 

 accompanied by drawings, which are fairly accurate so far as they go. 



In " Science Gossip," 1872, Dr. F. CoUins described the same 

 organism as a new species, and gave a very incoiTect account of it, 

 stating that " the pellet with which the animal builds its tube is formed 

 in a kind of >^a.c, situated at the lower extremity of the abdomen," (fee. 

 In the " Monthly Microscopical Journal," July 1st, 1872, Mr. C. Cubitt 

 takes this species as illustrative of the structural differences between 

 FlosculariiD and Mehcertidas, and speaks of it as a form with which he 

 had been acquainted for some years, and which he had called M. pilula, 

 from the fact that " she fortifies the gelatinous basis of the thoca with 

 her own excrementitious pilules." 



In this paper the author proposed to divide the whole thccated 

 section of llotifera into two families only, distinguished primarily by the 



