162 
THE GEOLOGIST. 
bj tlie artillery of able antagonists. Dr. Bowerbank is considered 
to be the 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 Barnsbury Grove to differ in opinion 
from the ventriculite-anatomist of Highgate Hill. Mr. Smith be- 
lieves them to be highly-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 
prey or on fragments of animal substances which came within their 
clutch. What Dr. Bowerbank believes them to be we need not say 
is — sponges. 
Now we quite agree with Mr. Smith in one of the opening remarks 
of his articles printed in the ' Annals of Natural History ' in 1848, 
" 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 the 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 w^hole 
organism was seen thus to be made up of a 
Fig. 2. 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 
