April — sept. 1859.] Sea round the Shores of Bombay. 155 



the product of a true act of generation, or the final effort to form 

 of the protoplasm, to which I have already called attention in 

 many of the Algae and Infusoria; while the remainder of the red 

 oil which is not required for the nourishment of the monads be- 

 comes liberated with the latter on the bursting of the capsule and 

 thus dispersed in the water. A further consequence of the fissi- 

 paration is the constant shedding of their capsules, which are al- 

 ways present with them in great numbers, and so brittle that pres- 

 sure of the thinnest piece of glass bursts them, and again sets free 

 the Peridinium when they contain one. 



Thus we see that the red color is produced by the formation of 

 oil reddened at the expense of the green chlorophyll. The same 

 process takes place in the little Protococcus, which I have here- 

 tofore shown to impart the red color to the salt in th e salt-pans of 

 Bombay ; and again in a freshwater animalcule closely allied to 

 Peridinium, viz., Euglena viridis : while a more familiar illustra- 

 tion than any is presented to us by the red color which the leaves 

 of some trees assume towards death, viz., the passing of the green 

 chlorophyll and oil into a yellow, brown, and then red, waxy sub- 

 stance, from whence we may also infer that like changes in the 

 Peridinium give rise to the prevalence of one or other of these 

 tints in the coloration of the sea. 



The species of Peridinium, now more particularly under our 

 consideration, I described several years since in its fixed form as) 

 it was submitted to me) undergoing fissiparation (see Dr. Buist's 

 paper on " Discolorations of the Sea, &c." Proceedings of the 

 Bombay Geographical Society, 1855, p. 109,) but never having 

 met with it again in its active state, until the 26th Nov. last, my 

 attention was not again drawn to the subject, nor did I until 

 then know what the animalcule really was. I shall call it animal- 

 cule, though, like Euglena, and all this class, it really belongs much 

 more to the vegetable than the animal kingdom : and believing 

 the species to have hitherto been unrecognised, its description 

 under the designation of " sanguineum" may stand as follows : — 

 Peridinium Sanguineum, fnov, sp.J. — Sub-circular when green, be- 

 coming larger and paraboloidal or kite-shaped when red. Com- 

 pressed, sulcated on one side ; surrounded transversely by a deep 



