162 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



bv the artillerv of able antagonists. Dr. Bowerbauk is considered 

 to be tlie only powerful opponent of Mr. Smith's views : but whether 

 the Doctor has expressed his opinions in print or only verbally in 

 ordinary conversation, we do not know ; at any rate, the world be- 

 lieves the amiable philosopher of Barnsbui y Qrove to differ in opinion 

 from the ventriculite-anatomist of Highgate Hill. Mr. Smith be- 

 lieves them to be higlily-organized polypidoms, which in their living 

 state were covered over with tentaculated polypes, or that at least 

 were studded with hundreds of tentacle-surrounded heads, ever 

 waving their tiny arms, and catching and feeding upon the tiny 

 prej" or on ;r: j-v :' .:s of animal substances which came within their 

 clutch. "\\'iuir Vr. Bowerbank believes them to be we need not say 

 is — sponges. 



Now we quite agree with j\Ir. Smith in one of the opening remarks 

 of his articles printed in the ' Annals of Natural History ' in 1S4S, 

 "that the knowledge of any creature is not merely the sight, or bare 

 handling, or even the giving a name to a specimen ; it must imply 

 some knowledge of structure or functions." Now Mr. Toulmin 

 Smith did not rest content with seeing and naming these curious 

 organisms, but he spent weeks at the Burnham chalk-pits, near 

 Maidstone, in collecting them, and months in slicing the hard flints, 

 in which the organized structures were best preserved, with the 

 lapidary's wheel, and painsfully examining thin slices and polished 

 surfaces under tlie microscope. He did more than this. In the 

 chalk, as in the flints, the fibres of the ventriculites are preserved in 

 threads of sulphuret or oxide of iron, and by dissolving away the soft 

 chalk with weak acid, he left the iron-threads standing out free from 

 their calcareous matrix, and exhibiting a model in metallic rust of their 

 former natural structure. In these ways he developed a condition of 

 inosculating fibres in some specimens, which then presented an extra- 

 ordinary anomaly in animal structure — and which remains, we do 

 not hesitate to say, an anomaly still. These 

 fibres were seen to form the outlines, so to 

 speak, of octahedrons. Straight in them- 

 selves, they first crossed each other, and then 

 these joints were cross-braced by other fi- 

 bres, as in the following fig. 2. The whole 

 organism was seen thus to be made up of a 

 webbing or tissue, all the joints of the 

 crossing threads of which were cross-braced and strengthened in this 

 remarkable way (fig. 3) ; so that, of the finest, and perhaps most 



