Zoology of A mphioxus 175 



ture, which conclusively negatived the hypothesis of 

 Professors King and Rowney that this structure was due to 

 the intermixture of calcareous and siliceous constituents. 



Oct. 25th, lyyth meeting. Dr. Carpenter read a letter 

 from Professor Wyville Thomson giving an account of a 

 small crinoid dredged by M. Sars * from deep water on 

 the west coast of Norway. Though only about three 

 inches long, it was a mature form and related to the 

 Jurassic Apiocrinus. 



He also mentioned the publication of a memoir by a 

 Russian zoologist on Amphioxus, 2 which is remarkably 

 abundant in the Bay of Naples. He had proved that, 

 notwithstanding the absence of a true spinal column and of 

 some other characters of the vertebrata, it was rightly 

 classed with them, though utterly unlike them in its earlier 

 stages, when it has more resemblance to a medusa. 



Nov. 2gth, I78th meeting. Col. Sykes called the attention 

 of the Club to the case of a young naturalist, who had been 

 arrested in Japan for digging up skulls in a native cemetery 

 and banished from that country and China. 



Professor Frankland spoke of a recently published 

 pamphlet describing experiments on animal respiration and 

 excretion with an apparatus much better adapted for that 

 purpose than any hitherto in use. It consisted of a glass 

 case large enough to contain a man with his workshop and 

 a bed, so that quantitative determinations could be made of 

 the egesta, ingesta and products of respiration both in a 

 condition of rest and after hard work. The results obtained 

 were (i) that the amount of work, if it at all affects the 

 excretion of urea, very lightly lessens it ; (2) that during 

 hard work a considerably greater amount of carbonic acid 



1 It was obtained off the Lofoten Islands by Mr. G. O. Sars, son of the 

 well-known Professor in the University of Christiania, at a depth of about 

 300 fathoms. A description and figure of Rhizocrinus loffotensis, as it 

 was named, is given by Prof. Wyville Thomson in The Depths of the Sea 

 (1873), pages 447-451. 



* Branchiostoma (the lancelet), so named by Costa in 1834, two years 

 before it was called Amphioxus by Yarrell, is the only genus of the family. 

 It contains eight or nine species, and belongs to a very archaic type. 



