50 NATURAL HISTORY MISCELLANY. 
return towards evening to the flats and marshes to feed, for they are not 
a duck that dives for its food, but ciu up as our puddle ducks do when 
feeding. 
All the species here mentioned may have been seen and shot by others, 
but so far as I have observed only Coots, Eiders, Black Ducks, Velvet 
Ducks and Scoters winter here. Since most ducks are strong fliers, 
capable of travelling forty to sixty miles an hour, it would take but about 
one night's flight for them to reach us from Long Island Sound or even 
the Delaware waters, and a few warm days may be sufficient to tempt 
some here, now and then, that are not probably winter residents, a fact 
that may have been overlooked by some who may have observed certain 
of them here in win 
Is HuxrLEY's BATHYBIUS AN ANIMAL? —In the ** sesion Journal” 
for October, 1868, is a memoir by Professor Huxley, ** On some organ- 
isms living at great depths in the North Atlantic ipy in which he 
states that the stickiness of the deep-sea mud is due to **innumerable 
lumps of a transparent gelatinous substance,” each lump consisting of 
granules, —À and foreign bodies, embedded in a transparent, color- 
less, and structureless matrix." b. granules form heaps which are 
sometimes the one-thousandth of an inch or more in diameter h 
** granule" is a rounded or oval ašies which is stained yellow by iodine, 
and Huxley proposes to call it Bathybius. The ** Discolithi and the Cya- 
tholithi,' some of which resemble the ** Jara are said to bear the 
same ‘relation to the protoplasm of brin aca as pes spicula of sponges 
do to the soft parts of those animals; but t be borne in min 
that the spicula of sponges are dtnbedds d in à nist. which is formed 
by and contains, beside the spicula, small masses of living or germinal 
matter. Asin other cases, this matrix, with the living matter tanger, 
constitutes the ‘ PE of Mr. Huxle 
Dr. Wallich has, however, arrived at a very different conclusi In 
& paper ‘On the Vital Functions of the Deep-sea Protozoa,” jodli 
in No. 1 of the “Monthly Microscopical Journal,” January, 1869, this 
observer, who has long been engaged in this and kindred studies, states 
that the coccoliths and the coccospheres stand in no direct relation to 
the protoplasm substance referred to by Huxley, under the name of 
ius. rm derived from their parent coccospheres, 
which are independent structures altogether. ** Bathybius,” instead of 
being a widely extending living protoplasm which grows at the expense 
of inorganic elements, is rather to be regarded as a complex mass 
of slime with many foreign bodies and the debris of living organisms 
which have passed away. Numerous living forms are, however, still 
found on it. 
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