485 
LXII.—Notes on Dr. Bowerbank’s Paper on Wyalonema. 
By Dr. J. E. Gray, F.R.S. 
I HAVE no desire to enter into a controversy with Dr. Bower- 
bank on this subject, for I have always highly estimated him as 
an enthusiastic collector, a good microscopist, and always willing 
to communicate all he knows; and I shall be glad to study his 
promised paper, premising that I am not aware that there is 
much to be added on the subject to what has been said by Dr. 
Max Schultze, Dr. Brandt, and Senhor Bocage. At present I 
only wish to explain what Dr. Bowerbank calls my “ misrepre- 
sentations.”’ 
To establish the first, Dr. Bowerbank, doubtless unintention- 
ally, misquotes my paper, and makes me appear to say what I 
did not intend to convey. After referring to the zoologists who 
have regarded the “glass rope” of the coral as part of the 
of the sponge, in a separate paragraph I observed, “ Dr. Bower- 
bank, adopting the same view,” &c.; and, as I am always anxious 
to fairly represent what any one who differs from me on a scien- 
tific subject has to say, 1 quoted at length the characters that 
Dr. Bowerbank reprints in his note, and his other observations 
on the genus. So I do not see how I could misrepresent him. 
Secondly, Dr. Bowerbank says I ‘“ misrepresent him,” as I 
ought to have recollected that he examined the specimens of 
Hyalonema in the British Museum in 1860. I may observe 
that I do not keep any note or record of what specimen any 
visitor examines. Dr. Bowerbank appears to have confined his 
examination to the structure of the spicula, and it is only the 
spicula that are figured in the plates in the ‘Philosophical 
Transactions’ which he quotes. I can hardly call such a study 
of the specimens “a careful microscopical examination of their 
anatomical structure.’ If Dr. Bowerbank has examined anato- 
mically the animal structure, it 1s most extraordinary that he 
did not discover that what he calls “the oscula” of his “ cloacal 
system” were social Zoanthz with plicated stomachs, retractile 
conical tentacles, and all the anatomical structure of that type 
of animals—more especially as Professor Brandt, in his essay 
published in 1859, a year before Dr. Bowerbank’s examination, 
had described and figured these parts in detail; and Brandt’s 
observations have more recently been confirmed by Senhor 
Bocage. 
Dr. Bowerbank is unfortunate in his observations on my 
paper. Thus he observes, “The fact of the presence of siliceous 
spicula in the inner coat of what he [Dr. Gray] terms the bark 
of Hyalonema should have warned him that it could not belong 
to either of the genera ‘ Corticaria’ (qu. Corticifera) or Zoan- 
