548 SUMMARY OF CURRENT RESEARCHES RELATING TO 



life, and this thougli the temperature of the water reaches 40° C. to 

 49° C By their death and decomposition they furnish to the water 

 the nitrogenous organic material which it holds in solution, and the 

 gradual transformation of their remains into glairine precisely similar 

 to that formerly observed is described by the author, who concludes 

 that the concrete glairine of chemists is a complex substance, into the 

 composition of which enters as a primordial element, a vast amount 

 of animal and vegetable detritus. The " sulfuraire " is a very different 

 production, but its fragments and those of various inorganic sub- 

 stances go to swell the mass of the glairine. 



In a note to the paper is given a list of the organized bodies, to 

 the number of 39, that have been recorded as occurring in sulphurous 

 waters ; whilst figures of Nais sulfurcea and Cyclops Dumasti are 

 given in the plate. 



Organisms in Hail-stones.* — Boyd Moss has, on two or three 

 occasions during the last twelvemonth, collected a few hailstones in 

 a conical glass, so that anything contained in them subsided to the 

 bottom as they melted, and has always found organized remains, but 

 he never had any idea of the quantity of these till a recent hail- 

 storm. He figures the contents of a single hailstone (about 1/4 in. in 

 diameter), which he placed, with every precaution as to cleanliness, 

 between the glasses of a live-box. These consisted of diatoms, a 

 living Amoeba, a spore, probably of fungus, pale yellowish bodies like 

 ova about 3 to 4 times the diameter of a human red blood-corpuscle 

 (at least 40 of these), and a dark brown mass with small bright 

 spherules. The Amoeba and one diatom were in active movement. 

 The spore (?) he calls the attention of microscopists to, and would be 

 glad to hear if they are acquainted with it, " as it is one of several of 

 the same kind which he discovered among the fibres of the heart of 

 animals dead from cattle disease in India in 1870, and described in 

 the ' Monthly Microscopical Journal ' for December of that year, 

 p. 312." 



Mollusca. 



Suckers of Sepiola.f — M. Niemiec describes the structure of the 

 suckers of Sepiola rondeletii. The general features appear to agree 

 pretty closely with the account given by P. Girod of the suckers of 

 other CephalopodSj^ but present some special peculiarities. 



The sucker consists of three parts : (1) the basal portion imbedded 

 in the subepithelial tissues of the arm ; (2) the peduncle ; (3) the 

 sucker proper. The basal portion is surrounded by a layer of annular 

 muscles ; within this is a longitudinal layer, while the centre is 

 occupied by a series of radiately arranged fibres. These three layers 

 are continued into the peduncle, and in the short arms terminate in 

 the piston of the sucker, while in the two long arms they are inserted 

 into a rounded cartilage. In other respects the suckei-s upon the 



* Kuowledge, v. (1884) p. 423 (1 tig.). 



t Arch. Sci. Phys. et Nat., xi. (1884) pp. 100-2. 



X See this Journal, iii. (1883) p. 636. 



