REMARKS ON SOME CURIOUS SPONGES. 17 
guage differing equally from the Aymara and Quichua, called 
Puquina, and the early chroniclers speak of them as ex- 
tremely savage, so much so that when asked who they were, 
they answered, they were not men but Uros, as if they did 
not belong to the human family. Whole towns of them, it 
is said, lived on floats of totora or reeds, which they moved 
from place to place according to their convenience or neces- 
sities. 
REMARKS ON SOME CURIOUS SPONGES. 
BY PROFESSOR JOSEPH LEIDY. 
Amone the many remarkable marine productions which 
puzzle the naturalist as to their relationship in the animal 
kingdom, is thé Hyalonema mirabilis of the Japan seas. 
First described and named by Dr. John E. Gray, of the 
British Museum, this distinguished zoologist viewed it as a 
coral related with Grigoris or the Sea Fan. 
The specimens of Hyalonema, as ordinarily preserved, 
appear as a loosely twisted bundle of threads converging 
to a point at one extremity of the fascicle and more or less 
divergent at the other. The threads bear so much resem- 
blance to spun glass that the production has received the 
name of the Glass Plant. They are mainly composed of 
silex and are translucent, shining, and highly flexible. The 
fascicle is upwards of a foot and a half in length and near 
half an inch thick. The threads range from the thickness 
of an ordinary bristle to that of a stout darning needle. 
Specimens of the Hyalonema fascicle, as they have been 
brought to us, almost invariably present some portion in- 
vested with a brown warty crust; the wart-like elevations 
terminating in a cylindrical ring with radiating ridges. These 
elevations are the individual polyps, continuous through the 
AMER. NATURALIST, VOL. IV. 3 
