LATTICE WORKERS, OR POLYCYSTINA. 85 



character, until it was shown by me that absolutely 

 identical bodies, in all save colour, are common to 

 the entire class. Their office had, moreover, until 

 then been either altogether unrecognised, or, so far as 

 I am aware, referred to only more or less incidentally, 

 as in some manner connected with reproduction. 

 It was in the course of a laborious day-by-day series 

 of observations on the fresh-water and littoral 

 Rhizopods, that I was enabled to compare and trace 

 clearly, and consecutively, the mode of origin of 

 these remarkable bodies, and to prove beyond all 

 reasonable doubt that they constitute a true repro- 

 ductive organ, formed either directly by the aggre- 

 gation into minute sphseroidal masses of granular, 

 probably germinal, particles, which, up to the period 

 of this change taking place, are more or less 

 uniformly distributed through the sarcode mass 

 generally ; or, indirectly, by the subdivision of the 

 contents of the granular nuclear mass itself, without, 

 however, acquiring in any instance a membranous 

 covering. For these combined reasons, which had 

 obviously made the term ' yellow cells ' a dangerous 

 misnomer, I designated them sarcoblasts. Whether 

 in the fresh-water littoral or oceanic Rhizopods, the 

 sarcoblasts invariably constitute, when liberated from 

 the parent organism, either at once the infant shell- 

 less organism, or the nidus, and at the same 

 time the infant mass of sarcode, within which the 



