WHAT ARE THE YE2fTilICULITES ? 
163 
brittle, thread-wires, a structure of the most dehcate 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 ou 
their " muck-heap " — 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. 
Now, 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 sponges. 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 Amokphozoa ; 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 
efibrts, 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 arrangemeut, 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 18G2, when 
no living man is equal to the acquirement of a universal and perfect 
knowledge of the progress of the sciences. 
