48 TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



burden quietly sank out of sight. It was a cruel disappointment, 

 every one was on the bridge, and curiosity was wound up to 

 the highest pitch : some vowed that they saw resting on 

 the beam of the vanishing trawl the white hand of the 

 mermaiden for whom we had watched so long in vain ; but 

 I think it is more likely that the trawl had got bagged with 

 the large sea-slugs which occur in some of these deep dredgings 

 in large quantity, and have more than once burst the trawl 

 net." 



Here is a record of an historic event in our knowledge of 

 the Protozoa (p. 293) :— 



" On one occasion in the Pacific, when Mr. Murray was 

 out in a boat in a dead calm collecting surface creatures, he 

 took gently up in a spoon a little globular gelatinous mass 

 with a red centre, and transferred it to a tube. This globule 

 gave us our first and last chance of seeing what a pelagic 

 foraminifer really is when in its full beauty. When placed 

 under the microscope it proved to be a Hastigerina in a condition 

 wholly different from anything which we had yet seen. The 

 spines, which were mostly unbroken, owing to its mode of 

 capture, were enormously long, about fifteen times the diameter 

 of the shell in length ; the sarcode, loaded with its yellow 

 oil-cells, was almost all outside the shell, and beyond the 

 fringe of yellow sarcode the space between the spines to a 

 distance of about twice the diameter of the shell all round 

 was completely filled up with delicate bullae, like those which 

 we see in some of the Kadiolarians, as if the most perfectly 

 transparent portion of the sarcode had been blown out into 

 a delicate froth of bubbles of uniform size. Along the spines 

 fine double threads of transparent sarcode, loaded with minute 

 granules, coursed up one side and down the other, while 

 between the spines independent thread-like pseudopodia 

 ran out, some of them perfectly free, and others anastomosing 

 with one another or joining the sarcodic sheaths of the spines, 



