of Edinburgh, Session 1885 — 86 . 
847 
more than one smaller one, but I did not come across any case of 
this sort. The balls are for the most part spherical or nearly so, 
hut a considerable proportion of them are irregular in shape, as the 
specimens exhibited show. I heard them described not badly, if in 
a somewhat unscientific way, by one of the islanders as being like 
“a lot of potatoes.” The smaller the balls the more spherical do 
they seem to be. I unfortunately made no attempt to secure the 
largest I met with, but I remember an angler saying he had seen 
one ball “as big as his hat.” As this gentleman was a clergyman 
there could, of course, be no doubt as to the correctness of his 
statement, and the only question is as to the size of his head, which 
I stupidly omitted to measure. I can only say that I saw no balls 
of anything like the size of my own head. 
There are three sets of the balls on the table here this evening — 
(1) some of those which I took out of the loch in August last, and 
which have been lying untouched ever since ; (2) some which Mr 
Charles MacLean of Milton (whose farm is close to the loch) was 
good enough to get for me during the winter ; (3) some which were 
sent to me last week by Mr Mearns, the obliging hotel-keeper at 
Lochboisdale, whose inn — a most comfortable house — is about 71- 
miles from Lower Kildonan. Illustrations of two of the balls exhi- 
bited are given on the accompanying Plate. Pigs. 1 and 2 represent 
one of the fresh balls not many days out of the water. Fig. 3 shows 
a dried specimen, taken from the loch nearly a year ago. 
I have also placed on the table a very interesting ball of the same 
description, which has been lent to me by Professor L. Fischer of the 
Botanical Gardens in Bern, and which comes, he tells me, from Elles- 
mere, in Shropshire. At a meeting of the Naturforschende Gesell- 
schaft of Bern in 1884, Professor Fischer referred to these algoid 
lake-balls, of which he says a number of varieties are distinguished 
according to the structure of the filaments and the size of the balls. 
He says they are met with in lakes chiefly in Sweden, Norway, 
Northern Germany, Austria, and Upper Italy ; and he adds that they 
are also found in the sea (“auch marine Fundorte werden angegeben”). 
I wrote to Professor Fischer, and received from him this English lake- 
ball. It will be seen that the filaments are longer and more silky, and 
of a somewhat different shade of green from the other balls exhibited. 
I have mentioned that the people in South Uist, to whom I put 
my first questions regarding the balls, asserted that they were found 
