No. 2.] SPLNVNMING ACTIVITIES OF PROTOPLASM. 385 
be answered that the same question having great weight in 
the observer’s mind, every effort was made to learn the 
truth. 
Thus much was made sure. The eggs can be stimulated by 
additional heat, by polyspermy, by adverse states of the water 
such as are caused by too long confinement, by mechanical 
pressure, or by being fertilized:when in a still immature con- 
dition, to spin far more freely. 
But the protoplastic phenomena in these cases are distinctly 
different from those of what I was impelled to believe were 
normal eggs. 
The character of the formations, the quantity of the egg sub- 
stance, and the use made of it during the normal and abnormal 
states, are so different, so characteristic, that, after following 
a dozen or two specimens of abnormal spinnings in all grades 
of pathology, one feels an almost unshakable assurance in the 
nature of the true and normal process, and would almost be 
willing to diagnose the state of an egg by the very character of 
its spinnings in any given case. 
Immature eggs being fertilized, or over-fertilized, give them- 
seives up to uncontrolled spinning activities which in many 
cases end by the whole mass being drawn out of form and 
position and distributed through the surrounding space in a 
granular and unevenly vesiculate, or a partially structureless, net- 
work of substance. The transported substance may mass itself 
here or there, adhering perhaps to the membrane and thence 
setting up from broken, or partly isolated, lumps and nodes of 
protoplasm new centres of activity. 
Traversing relatively large spaces, often by way of invisible 
extensions of substance, the deported protoplasm accumulates 
at this or that point; and then may disappear, to come again 
within optical reach as a new current from nowhere flowing 
into or onto some filament in plain sight ; or as small lumps 
of substance, growing from some invisible source, suspended in 
an otherwise empty space, their true source being some distant 
filament, or the egg mass from which outflowing currents take 
their way, and pass at some point from one’s power to trace 
them optically. 
