THE ANNALS 



AND 



MAGAZLNE OF NATURAL IIISTOEY. 



[FIFTH SERIES.] 

 No. 105. kSEPTEMBER 1SS6. 



XVIII.— C« the Genus Hindia, Dune. By Dr. H. Rauff *. 



The genus Hindia was established by Duncan in an excel- 

 lent memoir f, for some very insignificant-looking, more or less 

 perfectly globular bodies from the Lower Helderberg group 

 of New Brunswick, which he named Hindia splia^roidalis. 

 He had received the fossils from Hinde, who had previouslyt 

 described them brietly as a Tabulate Coral under the name of 

 Sphairolites Nichulsoni. Duncan recognized the sponge- 

 nature of the bodies and the tetracladine character of the 

 sponge-skeleton ; but the circumstance that in the specimens 

 before him the latter were calcified, and the presence in 

 them of a vegetable parasite (?), Pakeachli/a penetrans, Dune, 

 prevented his actually referring the sponge to the Tetra- 

 cladina, and rather led him to the notion (which I believe to 

 be erroneous, and to which I shall recur hereafter) that we 

 have here an Upper Silurian, and therefore the earliest known, 

 Calcisponge, the skeletal elements of which arc constructed 

 upon the type of the Tctracladina. 



* Trauslated by W. S. Dallas, F.L.S., from a separate impression, 

 communicated by the Author, of his memoir iu the ' Sitzungsberichte der 

 Niederrheinischeu Gesellschaft zu Bonn,' 10th May, 1886. 



t Ann. & Mag. Nat. Hist. ser. 5, vol. iv. (1879), p. 84, pi. ix. 



I Abstracts of Proc. Geol. Soc. no, 305 (187o). 



Ann. & Mag. N. Hist. Ser. 5. Vol. xviii. 12 



