1900J MICROSCOPICAL JOURNAL 217 



It was in 1851 when engaged in studying the minute ani- 

 mals of the sea brought home by H. M. S. "Rattlesnake" 

 Prof. Huxley came across the peculiar gelatinous bodies 

 which he called Thalassicolla, signifying sea-jelly. They 

 were common in the tow-net and are formed of extreme 

 simplicity which made it extremely difficult to place 

 them, that is to say to classify them in the animal king- 

 dom. They are a colorless, transparent, gelatinous mass, 

 spherical, elliptical or elongated in form or contracted like 

 an hour-glass in one or more places. They vary in size 

 from a mere speck up to an inch in length, without con- 

 tractility or power of motion, but float passively upon the 

 water. Such were the masses of jelly which he saw and 

 named Thalassicolla. The "species" as he called them were 

 T. punctata and T. morum, but they proved afterwards 

 to be Radiolaria, and the observation of Thalassicolla 

 brings us to the difficulty of classifying objects. Huxley, 

 one of the greatest classifiers of the modern school, did 

 at first find it difficult to classify them at all. And now 

 we confess it is difficult to classify animals or vegetables 

 as such. We must rank these simple organisms as Pro- 

 tista. 



Life in the Great Salt Lake. 



DR. J. E. TALMAGE. 



The popular literature of the day persists in asserting 

 that no living thing exists or can exist in the dense brine 

 of the Great Salt Lake. There is little excuse for the per- 

 petuation of such an error ; yet cyclopedias and school 

 geographies and magazines continue to reiterate the false 

 statements. It is readily seen that the conditions pre- 

 vailing in the lake are not favorable to the existence of 

 the ordinary aquatic forms of life ; and that cases of adap- 

 tation to life in the brine would naturally be rare. 



Of animals but few species have been found in the lake, 

 but of these few two are represented by swarming num- 



