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April 6, 1854. 

 THOMAS GRAHAM, Esq., V.P., in the Chair. 



Notice was given that at the next Meeting of the Society, Lord 

 Ashburton would be proposed for immediate ballot, to which, as a 

 Peer of the Realm, his Lordship is entitled. 



The following communications were read : 



I. " On a peculiar Arrangement of the Sanguiferous System in 

 Terebratula and certain other BRACHIOPODA." By W. B. 

 CARPENTER, M.D., F.R.S. Received March 30, 1854. 



In a memoir " On the Minute Structure of Shell," read before the 

 Royal Society January 17, 1843, (and subsequently embodied in a 

 " Report " on the same subject, prepared at the request of the 

 British Association for the Advancement of Science, and published 

 in its Transactions for 1844,) I first announced the fact, that the 

 ' punctations ' which had been previously noticed on the exterior 

 of many Brachiopodous shells, both recent and fossil, are really the 

 orifices of tubular perforations, which pass directly through each 

 valve, from one of its surfaces to the other (fig. 1). 



Having subsequently obtained specimens of Terebratula in which 

 the soft parts of the animals had been preserved, in connection with 

 their shells, I ascertained that these passages are occupied in the 

 living state by membranous caeca, closed externally, but opening on 

 the internal surface of the shell, and filled with minute cells of a 

 brownish hue. Recollecting that Professor Owen, in his account of 

 dissections of some species of Terebratula and Orbicula (Transac- 

 tions of the Zoological Society, vol. i.), had spoken of an unusual 

 adhesion of the mantle to the shell in these Bivalves, it occurred to 

 me that this adhesion might be due to a continuity between the 



