Notes and Memoranda. 311 



liim at St. Helena. It contains two rows of saw-like teeth, with four larger 

 conical teeth in the front, arranged in two pairs ; the hindmost pair being very- 

 sharp and slightly curved backwards. The extreme length of (his specimen is 

 -j-Jo of an inch, and he estimated the creature to which it belonged as being only 

 2^ of an inch long. 



New Spider from Cochin China. — Dr. Albert Gr'unther figures and de- 

 scribes, in Annals of Natural History, a spider from the above named locality, 

 remarkable for the prolongation of its abdomen, which is " anteriority produced 

 into a very long, thin, cylindrical process, which is twice bent, so that its basal 

 half is leaning backwards on the back of the abdomen, while its terminal half is 

 directed upwards and forwards. The cephalo-thorax being united with the 

 abdomen at no great distance from the spinners, the anterior portion of the 

 abdomen with its appendage, is situated vertically above the thorax." 



Zooteira Keligata. — Dr. T. Strethill Wright describes, in 'the Quarterly 

 Journal of Microscopic Science, New Series, No. VIII., this elegant creature, 

 which he found in oyster-shells, dredged from deep water, in the Firth of Forth, 

 near Edinburgh. He says, although the animals are not common, yet we occa- 

 sionally meet with a shell completely covered with a dense forest of them, each 

 consisting of a clear, glassy stalk, surmounted by a silvery star, and it is difficult 

 to imagine a more gorgeous microscopic display than such an assemblage affords, 

 especially when illuminated by oblique sunlight of vai'ious colours under low 

 powers. ^Zooteira is an actinophrys mounted on a contractile pedicle. The 

 long hair-like appendages of the head Dr. Wright terms " palpocils," and he 

 observes, " the animal remains for days with its palpocils sometimes stiffly extended, 

 at other times slightly relaxed, and yielding in gentle curvatures to the currents in 

 the water, and again at other times all thickened and clubbed at their extremities. 

 When any small animalcule comes into contact with a palpocil, it is instantly 

 taken prisoner, and the appendage recoils inwards with its prey to the body of 

 the Zooteira, like a released thread of caoutchouc. In this way the whole of the 

 body is sometimes studded with captured animalules, over which a film ofendosare 

 slowly creeps, and engulphs them." 



The GrENirs Freta. — In the same journal, Dr. T. S. Wright states that 

 certain protozoa, which he formerly described as Lagotia, must be called Freya, as 

 that name was given to them in a memoir of Claparede and Lachinan, written 

 before, but not published till after, his own paper. Dr. Wright now describes 

 several new species, and explains how F. producta constructs its tube or cell. The 

 adult animal (related to the Cothurnia Vaginicola, etc.) is furnished with two 

 long curved " rotatory lobes." Its larva, which is free swimming, secretes the 

 lower part of its cell, and fixes itself. It then builds up the long neck of the tube, 

 carefully moulding the plastic matter with its immature lobes, which it uses as a 

 pair of hands, just as sabella and serpula mould their tubes with their secreting 

 leaflets. Having erected its tube to the requisite height, it finishes it off with a 

 handsome trumpet-shaped mouth, and then retires to develop its long rotatory 

 lobes. " The cell of this species is furnished with an immensely prolonged neck, 

 formed of a ribbon of chitine, spirally wound in a tube, cemented by a thick 

 internal gelatinous layer, from which it derives its green colour, and covered by a 

 thin layer of that peculiar glutinous secretion which is used by various aquatic 

 animals to attach themselves and their habitation to the sites where they dwell. 

 This glutinous stuff Dr. Wright calls "colline." 



New Planet. — On the 29th of August, M. Tempel discovered a new 

 planet of 10 magnitude. M. Luther also thought he had found a new body of 

 the same kind, but it turned out to be M. G-oldsmidt's Daphne, discovered in 

 1856, and which has been lost sight of for six years. 



The Creat Comet of 1861. — Cosmos says that M. Sluzki, of Moscow, has 

 computed the time of revolution of this body to be 400 years. 



The Aplanatic Eyepiece. — Since our report of Mr. Burr's paper at the 

 Astronomical Society, on the Aplanatic Eyepiece made for telescopes by Messrs. 

 Home and Thomthwaite, we have made several trials of one constructed on the 



