AYHAT AEE THE TEyTEICULTTES ? 



163 



brittle, thread-wires, a structure of* the most delicate nature was 

 reared, and made rigid enough and strong enough to stand erect 

 against the gentle currents which flowed over the deep bottom of the 

 cretaceous sea. It is not our purpose here 

 to describe the species of ventriculites, bra- 

 chiolites, and cephalites which Mr. Smith 

 has recognized ; but we want to know what 

 ventriculites are, or at any rate to gather 

 some more information about them than is at 

 present possessed. Just as into the Infu- 

 soria naturalists put every sort of organism 

 whose nature they do not understand, so 

 geologists and palaeontologists have cast on 

 their " muck-lieap " — sponges — every sort of round, funnel-shaped, or 

 stemmed and ball-headed fossils which they have not knowledge 

 enough, or have not taken the pains to place anywhere else. 



Xow, if Mr. Smith be right in his account of this cross-braced 

 structure and in the interpretation he has put upon it, the ventri- 

 culites cannot be s£jonrjes. Spicula we have in sponges, but spicula 

 are always lying loose, never cross-braced by actual junctions. More- 

 over, sponges are of amorphous structure — they are typical of the 

 group AMORPnozoA; and a hundred-head tenticulated animal is not 

 amorphous. 



The case at the present hour stands much as it did fourteen years 

 ago — namely, thus : Mr. Toulmin Smith, by devoted and admirable 

 efforts, examined, arranged, and gave a nomenclature to these ventri- 

 culites ; and after a most rigid inquiry — carried a great way towards 

 perfection, but never perfected — asserted these characteristic fossils 

 of the chalk to have belonged to highly organized creatures, at least 

 approaching to the grade of the lower Polypifera. Then Professor 

 Morris, in his ' Catalogue of British Fossils,' adopting Mr. Smith's 

 nomenclature and generic and specific arrangement, replaced the 

 ventriculites in the Amorphozoa, without any written reason — such, 

 it is but justice to say, not being within the scope of his book — and 

 without having, as far as we know, in any other publication disputed 

 Mr. Toulmin Smith's facts. 



Professor Morris's dictum might have been taken when he first 

 published- his 'Catalogue,' many years ago ; but the dictum or judg- 

 ment of no man ought to be taken in this year of grace 1862, when 

 no living man is equal to the acquirement of a universal and perfect 

 knowledge of the progress of the sciences. 



Fig. 3. 



