44 Mr. H. J. Carter on Amoeba princeps 



from the eiidosarc to the external surface of the posterior ex- 

 tremity^ to which the villi in Amcpba may be analogous. 



I am not quite certain that they are peculiar to A. princeps, 

 although Dr. Wallich permits me to state that he now thinks 

 his A. villosa is one and the same with A. princeps. Still I have 

 a drawing of an Amoeba which has them, but does not appear to 

 have the characteristic form of the nucleus of A. princeps. If 

 they are confined to A. princeps, then they form a good dis- 

 tinguishing feature for this species ; but, as I have before stated, 

 they are not always present under the same form, and sometimes 

 not at all. 



Instinct. — Low in the scale of organized beings as the Rhizo- 

 poda may be considered, there are manifestations of instinct 

 occasionally evinced by them, of the same kind as those in the 

 highest animals. Even yEthaliu7n will confine itself to the 

 water of the w^atch-glass in which it may be placed when away 

 from the sawdust or chips of wood among which it has been 

 living; but if the watch-glass be placed upon the sawdust, it 

 will very soon make its way over the side of the watch-glass and 

 get to it. 



Here it should be premised that I regard all organic opera- 

 tions, even the development of the brain itself, as instinctive 

 ■ — that is, produced by the instinct originating in the proto- 

 plasm of the primordial germ from which each species may be 

 respectively derived after impregnation. Nay, before, back to 

 the finding of the ovules by their respective spermatozoids, I 

 regard every act of this kind as much an operation of instinct 

 as the building of a bird's nest, or the finding its way back for 

 many miles direct by an animal, to a place from which it has 

 never before been removed, viz. a power which exists before 

 as well as after mind, and is only known by its manifestations. 



Thus it is not wonderful that in the Rhizopoda such mani- 

 festations should present themselves ; but as others may be in- 

 clined to call this " automatic," or to interpret them differently, 

 I shall not go further into this matter now than to submit the 

 following facts for consideration : — 



On one occasion, while investigating the nature of some large, 

 transparent, spore-like, elliptical cells (fungal?) whose proto- 

 plasm was rotating while it was at the same time charged with 

 triangular grains of starch, I observed some actinophorous Rhizo- 

 pods creeping about them, which had similarly shaped grains of 

 starch in their interior ; and having determined the nature of 

 these grains in both by the addition of iodine, I cleansed the 

 glasses and placed under the microscope a new portion of the 

 sediment from the basin containing these cells and Actinophryans 

 for further examination, when I observed that one of the spore- 



