PROCEEDINGS OF THE SOCIETY. 1075 



The President said he was quite sure that the Fellows were indebted to 

 Mr. Beaumont for taking the trouble of coming so far to present to them a 

 detail of the facts as they appeared to him during the course of his obser- 

 vations. Whilst they should be most unwilling to do otherwise than give 

 their best thanks to Mr. Beaumont for his paper, yet, for his own part at least, 

 he should also be most unwilling to pronounce any opinion at present upon 

 the subject, but thought rather that they should wait until the time of year 

 arrived, when it would be possible to repeat the experiments in accordance 

 with the ideas expressed by Mr, Beaumont. The statements made in his 

 paper were so remarkable that it was not scepticism, but rather the exercise 

 of a true scientific spirit to suspend judgment uj)on the question until it 

 could be subjected to the test of experience. Those who had made obser- 

 vations upon minute forms, knew quite well, that though a slide might be 

 good in all respects, yet the water from a still pond sometimes contained 

 organisms which were capable of passing through the tube in their germ 

 forms and of subsequently developing when the conditions were favourable. 

 In one of the earlier volumes of the ' Monthly Microscopical Journal ' — that 

 for 1873 — there occurred a description of one of the monads, in which exactly 

 what Mr. Beaumont had stated appears to have been observed. In this case 

 the monad, after moving about in the same manner, became amceboid. 

 By-and-by two were seen to blend, and then, from this, spore-like bodies 

 were seen to emerge. It was, he thought, quite possible that Mr. Beaumont 

 might have interrupted this process, and also have introduced from ex- 

 traneous sources that which might lead to considerable confusion. There 

 were at least sufficient difficulties in the way to render it a matter for the 

 exercise of caution. It should be distinctly borne in mind, however, that 

 in this paper it was not the life-history of a single form which was de- 

 scribed, but the transformation of one well-known form into another, and 

 this again into a third and a fourth. 



Mr. Beaumont, iu reply to questions, said that the water which he used 

 to fill up the slide was tap water ; this was very good water in his part of 

 the country. The water flowed from one reservoir to the other by the fall 

 given to it by the inclination of the stage, and when it had all run through 

 it was only necessary to rotate the stage, and the process would repeat 

 itself from the other end. 



Professor Bell, in reply to the President's request for his opinion, said 

 that he had nothing to add to the remarks which had already been made by 

 the President, but would merely repeat in other words that in these matters 

 they must have the most absolute evidence of isolation in the case of the 

 organisms under observation ; if there was any doubt about that, of course 

 the experiments must be repeated. 



Mr. Beaumont said that the five ponds he had mentioned in his paper 

 contained a large number of organisms, and he should be very glad to send 

 up a supply to any one who wished to have some. 



Mr. Badcock said, that at p. 225 of Mr. Saville Kent's work on 

 Infusoria, there was an account which to a certain extent corroborated the 

 observations which the President had just quoted from the Journal. In 

 this he described and illustrated the direct metamorphosis of a flagellated 

 zooid into an organism like Adinoplirys. A similar life-history had also 

 been worked out by Mr. Fullagar, who also described Actinosphderium. His 

 own view was that Mr. Beaumont had, as he claimed, traced the life-history 

 of Amcaha from a flagellate monad to an ordinary Amoeba, thence into 

 Aciinophrys, and thence again into Bifflugia and Arcella, the tremulous 

 sarcode bursting from the cyst and dispersing a number of granules. Now 

 these granules, he presumed, would produce the original flagellate monad, 



