142 Mr. II. J. Carter on the discovery of the 



1 canal-system,' " &c, it was not to Sclmltze's book of 1854 

 on u Polythalamia " after all, but to a paper by Schultze 

 published many years afterwards, in the 'Archiv fur Natur- 

 geschichte,' 1863, p. 99 *, that I referred. The passage is 

 as follows : — " Mir fehlten z. B. die Arten der Carpenter'schen 

 Nummuliniden, so weit sie noch lebend vorkommen, fast 

 ganz, wesshalb ich auch nicht Gelegenheit hatte das von 

 Carter zuerst beschriebene verzweigte Rohrensystem wieder- 

 zusehen, wie ich p. 15 meines Buches angefiihrt habe." 

 [" I lacked almost entirely, for instance, any of the living 

 species of Carpenter's Nummulinida ; I therefore had no 

 opportunity of examining the ramified canal-system first de- 

 scribed by Carter, as I have stated in my book, page 15." 



If this passage, or the article in which it is contained, has 

 been read by our authors, it is not mentioned in their letter. 



The word " zuerst " here, applied to " ramified canal- 

 system," is an emphatic of "first," apparently indicative of 

 the author's intention to show that, although others had pre- 

 viously pointed out the fragments of this system, the system 

 itself, but for my having described and figured it in Opercu- 

 lum arabica, might have remained undiscovered until the 

 present day ; while it also might be added that the speci- 

 mens were not obtained by others, and " kindly placed in my 

 hands for description," but by myself direct on the south-east 

 coast of Arabia, while I was attached to its Surveying Ex- 

 pedition in 1844-45. 



We now come to the middle of the third paragraph from 

 the end) and here we find it stated that, " It is no part of our 

 present purpose to examine critically what Mr. Carter's paper 

 really added to the facts established by previous observers." 



In reply to which, I would state that the " facts of the 

 previous observers " are mentioned, and, as follows from the 

 above quotation, mine are suppressed ! 



But, critically considered, a far greater omission than this 

 occurs in neglecting to mention on this occasion the facts 

 which the following passage from MM. N. Joly et Leymerie's 

 " Memoire sur les Nummulites," published in the ' Memoires 

 de l'Academie des Sciences de Toulouse ' in 1848, records : — 

 " Sur plusieurs individus [Nummulites] dont les loges e'taient 

 vides, et dont la fossilisation n'avait pas confondu les diverscs 

 parties en une seule masse compacte, nous avons pu enlever 

 une a une toutes les tables qui entraient dans la composition 

 du test. En examinant avec une forte loupe les parties 



* Ann. & Mag. Nat. Hist. 3rd. ser. vol. xii. p. 421. 



