THE CROWN ANIMALCULE. 
27 
and delineation of these tiny creatures became the absorbing- 
occupation of my entire leisure. So elegant are their outlines, 
so brilliantly translucent their texture, so complex and 
yet so patent their organisation, so curious their locomo-„ 
five -wheels, so unique their apparatus for mastication, so 
graceful, so vigorous, so fleet, and so marked with apparent in- 
telligence their movements, so various their forms and types of 
structure, so readily attainable for study in almost every locality, 
and at all seasons of the year : that, as fact after fact and detail 
after detail of organisation and habit revealed itself to me, I 
often wondered that scarcely any one seemed to know anything 
about them beyond what might be picked up from turning over 
the pages of Ehrenberg at the soirees of the Microscopical, 
or from the abridged translation of his letterpress and the copies 
of his plates, which Pritchard had published. 
I have said that this line of study made me familiar with most 
of the accessible collections of water in and around London. 
It is one recommendation of the class Rotifera as an object of 
research, that the species are so easily procurable, even to a 
resident in great cities. A moderate walk sufficed to put me in 
possession of some or other of the hundred and twenty species 
that I know to be British, all of which, with the exception of a 
dozen or so, I have found immediately around London. 
Some of these waters were pi-ivate. My very first essay was 
on a pond in the grounds of Mr. Samuel Berger, at Clapton, 
where the white lily was sitting like a queen amidst her round 
green leaves, on the still surface. The large Eucldanis dilatata 
swimming at large, several kinds of Safina grubbing among 
the Nitella leaves, the pretty Mastigocerca carinata, with its rat- 
tail and its singular unsymmetrical dorsal keel, and the curious 
Acfi/nurus Neptimius, remarkable for its extreme development 
in length, with other more familiar kinds, rewarded my search 
here. From a reservoir in the grounds of Mr. Alfred Rosliiig, 
at Camberwell, were taken Monocerca wylata, a new species, 
Furcularia gracilis, Pli iindina roseola, remarkable for the rosy 
hue with which its transparent tissues are tinged, Notommata 
petromyzon, with its conspicuous ruby eye, and N. parasita, 
eating out the interior of the majestic spheres of Volvox globator. 
A tank in the garden of Mr. B. Edwards, at Shoreditch, which, 
though in the midst of brick and mortar, has been celebrated 
for the treasures which it has yielded to microscopists for more 
than a century, has yielded me, among many other things of 
interest, the fine Rotifer macrurus, Philodina aculeata, so sin- 
gularly studded with curved prickles like those of a rose-bush, 
and a new species of the very interesting genus, Gallidina. A 
small reservoir in my own garden, and even a mere earthenware 
pan, filled with water and allowed to stand hi the garden for some 
