214 THE AMERICAN MONTHLY fAu 



size. He does not know where to place them. They are 

 rocky it is true but they are not rock as usually known. 

 They are organic, that is to say, they plainly, when alive, 

 have organs. Perhaps they are animal, perhaps vegeta- 

 ble and perhaps neither animal nor vegetable. He deter- 

 mines that they belong to that wonderful kingdom the 

 Protista of Hseckel. He looks in his books to see what 

 they are called and perhaps he will find what they are. 

 Thus he discovers that they have been described by 

 Ehrenberg in 1838, (Mont. d. k. Preusa. Akad. d. Wiss. 

 Berlin, p. 128), who made no less than sixty species,, 

 thirty-five living and twenty-five fossil, and he described 

 them from portions also, the siliceous pieces : as if a spe- 

 cies can be described and formed from a broken bone 

 alone ! But in fact such things have been done. Ehren- 

 berg first observed single pieces of the Radiolaria, fossil 

 in the tertiary rocks and supposed them to be the silice- 

 ous carapace of a Diatom, a Bacillarian, and gave it the 

 following diagnosis : "Dictyocha e familias Bacillaria- 

 num. Lorica simplex univalvis silicea, laxe articulata aut 

 stellulata." On one view, the most common, it is like four 

 festrated pieces, joined together with four spines pro- 

 jecting outwards and four spines projecting inwards. On 

 another view, we see that they look like little hats of skel- 

 eton appearance with a spine projecting upwards. They 

 have not markings like the Bacillaria and are therefore 

 not members of that family. But Diatoms were animals 

 when Ehrenberg named them and included anything biz- 

 arre which he found. 



Haeckel in his Monograph of the Radiolaria, 1862, page 

 271, places them there, and they are destined to remain 

 until someone shall find out something more about them. 

 The greater part of Ehrenberg's sixty species cannot be 

 retained but Haeckel describes twelve species. He gives 

 one form which he says is cosmopolitan, Dictyocha stapedia 

 but this is D. fibula of Ehrenberg, 1839. 



