REPORT ON THE FORAMEN IFERA. 
265 
rule, both are drawn out so as to form long narrow tubes, the open extremities of which 
serve as pseudopodial apertures ; but owing to their tenuity and fragile nature, one or both 
of the tubular terminations are very commonly found more or less broken and imperfect. 
There is considerable variety in the shape of the test, which is scarcely ever even 
approximately straight, but is bent and twisted in the most capricious manner, as well as 
in the proportionate length and width of the specimens. In short examples the length, 
compared with the width in the broadest part, is in the proportion of 4 to 1 ; whilst 
in the slender forms the width is sometimes only one-seventeenth of the length. 
With a few rare exceptions, the minute structure of the test presents tolerably 
uniform characters. The walls are always thin and firmly cemented, and rough 
externally. In the broad central portion they are constructed of coarse sand, with 
only here and there a sponge-spicule, as represented on an enlarged scale in figure 18. 
Small specimens are occasionally found exhibiting this sandy structure from one end to 
the other, as in figures 16 and 17, but they are quite exceptional, and as a general 
rule the narrow tubular extremities of the test are built almost exclusively of acerate 
sponge-spicules. 
Marsipella elongata is essentially a North Atlantic species, notwithstanding a few 
specimens that have been collected elsewhere. It is abundant in the warm area of the 
Faroe Channel, at depths of from 440 fathoms to 542 fathoms ; it is also common on the 
Eockall Bank, 54 fathoms, and still more plentiful at a Station somewhat further south, 
630 fathoms, and again west of Valentia, 808 fathoms; it occurs off Gomera, Canary 
Islands, 620 fathoms ; and off the Azores, 900 fathoms. In the South Atlantic it has 
been met with at a single Station, south of Pernambuco, 350 fathoms ; and in the South 
Pacific, the record of its occurrence is confined to a solitary specimen at Station 192, off 
the Ki Islands, 129 fathoms, and two or three from a sounding off Kandavu, Fiji Islands, 
210 fathoms. 
Marsipella cylindrica , H. B. Brady (PI. XXIV. figs. 20-22). 
Marsipella cylindrica , Brady, 1882, Proc. Roy. Soc. Edin., vol. xi. p. 714. 
Test consisting of a slender tube of nearly uniform diameter, but seldom straight ; 
constructed almost exclusively of acicular sponge-spicules, either entire or in fragments, 
laid side by side and forming irregular more or less interlacing tiers, the whole firmly 
cemented together ; the open ends of the tube serving as the aperture. Length indefi- 
nite ; the longest of the figured specimens ^th of an inch (6 to 7 mm.) or more. 
Amongst the Arenacea from the warm area of the Faroe Channel, dredged during the 
cruise of the “ Knight Errant,” were a number of these delicate spicular tests. They are 
tubes of tolerably even diameter, seldom exceeding ^th inch in length, and ranging from 
