yOL. LXVI.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 729 



ment where it is appointed to be. That there are ovaries in these animals is 

 without doubt ; for in most of those that were sent to me preserved in spirits, 

 the eggs were very visible on making longitudinal sections, in the same manner 

 and form as in the alcyonium digitatum, called dead man's hand ; see Philos, 

 Trans., vol. 53, Abridg. p. 41, vol. 12, but much larger; and it is very proba- 

 ble that many of these animals are viviparous, as we have seen among the 

 sertulariae. 



So that I must conclude, that though they grow in a branched form, they are 

 no more allied to vegetables than they are to the ramified configurations of sal 

 ammoniac ; to the elegant branched figures in the Mocha and other gems, called 

 dendrites ; to the arbor Dianae, or the arborescent figures of the Cornish native 

 copper : consequently, that animal life does not depend on bodies growing ac- 

 cording to a certain external form. Hence it appears, that this metamorphosis 

 of a plant to an animal is a flowery expression, and in my opinion, better suited 

 to the poetical fancy of an Ovid, than to that precise method of describing 

 which we so much admire in a natural historian. 



//. The F^ariation of the Compass; containing 1719 Observations to, in, and 

 from, the East-Indies, Guinea, West-Indies, and Mediteiranean, with the 

 Latitudes and Longitudes at the time of Observation. The Longitude for the 

 most Part reckoned from the Meridian of London. By Mr. Robert Douglass. 

 p. 18. 

 It is unnecessary to repeat these observations, as they, with many thousand 



other observations, have been employed by Messieurs Mountaine and Dodsoii, 



in constructing their universal magnetical charts. 



///. Propositions selected from a Paper on the Division of Right Lines, Surfaces, 

 and Solids. By James Glenie, A. M., of the University of Edinburgh, p. 73. 



Prop. 1 . If from the angles at the base of any right-lined triangle, right lines 

 be drawn to the alternate angles of rhombi, described on the opposite sides, and 

 applied reciprocally to the sides produced ; and from the vertex, through the inter- 

 section of these lines, a right line be drawn to meet the base : the segments of the 

 base, thus made, will have to each other the duplicate proportion of the sides. — 

 Let ACB be any right-lined triangle, fig. 1 1, pi. 13. Let afec, cdgb be rhombi ; 

 on any two sides ac, cb of this triangle, applied respectively to cb, ac pro- 

 duced : from the alternate angles epa, dgb, of which let fb, ga, be right lines 

 drawn to the angles at the base, or third side, ab. Then, if through the inter- 

 section o of these lines, a right line col be drawn from the vertex c to meet the 

 base ab ; the segments al, lb, of the base thus made, will have to each other 



VOL. XIII. 5 A 



