THE 
MONTHLY MICROSCOPICAL JOURNAL. 
NOYEMBEE 1, 1875. 
I. — On a New Melicerta. 
By C. T. Hudson, LL.D., F.E.M.S. 
{Read hefore the Royal Microscopical Society, Oct. 6, 1875.) 
Plate CXIX. 
In a review, that I read some time ago, of Mr. Wood's interesting 
book ' Homes without Hands ' the critic remarked that the author 
had omitted to notice one of the most curious of such structures, 
namely " the tube of Melicerta." 
The criticism was just, and yet the critic was inaccurate ; and 
while pointing out an omission in Mr. Wood's book he was guilty 
of a blunder in his own review, for he spoke of "the tube of 
Melicerta," just as one would of the cestus of Yenus, or of the 
club of Hercules ; — as if the rotifer had as inalienable a title to 
his tube, as the hero had to his weapon, or the goddess to her 
girdle. 
No doubt the critic erred in good company ; for what micro- 
scopist has not viewed with delight the opening of this living 
flower, and who has ever seen it set otherwise than in a pelleted 
tube, and who would have hesitated to assent to the proposition 
that all Melicertse have these marvellous homes ? Nature however 
seems to have but one law that knows no exception ; and that is 
that all general statements are untrue. Fifty years ago every 
naturalist would have considered it an axiom that every vertebrate 
animal had a skull ; and yet all the while burrowing in the sands of 
Cornwall there was the headless Lancelot, a vertebrate animal with 
the heart of a worm and the lungs of a mollusc, apparently created 
for the express purpose of driving classifiers mad. 
EXPLANATION OF PLATE CXIX. 
Fig. 1. — Female of Melicerta tyro ; oral view. 
„ 2. — „ „ aboral view. 
„ 3. — „ „ side view. 
a, a third antenna ; 6, ciliated cup. 
„ 4. — „ „ side view, from below. 
„ 5. — „ „ a young specimen. 
„ 6. — Supposed male of M. tyro. 
All the figures are on the same scale, and all are magnified about 125 times 
linear. 
VOL. XIV. R 
