740 
DE. W. B. CAEPENTEE AND ME. H. B. BEADY ON 
contour of the Canadian fossil, equally explains the indefinite extension of the shell- 
masses. 
22. The addition of Beceptaculites to the list of probable Foraminifera, and the sugges- 
tion that Stromatopora , Archceocyathus , and some other obscure fossils, hitherto regarded 
as Sponges in the absence of any very accurate knowledge of their structure, may find 
their nearest allies in the same category, are indications of a field of research from which 
great results may be anticipated. At the present moment, therefore, any investigations 
tending to throw light on what may properly be termed the gigantic types of Foramini- 
fera have greatly enhanced interest. 
23. Amongst the fossils collected by the late William Kennett Loftus, during his 
Archaeological and Geological researches near the line of the Turko-Persian Frontier*, 
were certain somewhat obscure bodies, oval or fusiform in shape, and occurring in suffi- 
cient abundance to give a special character to the rock in which they were imbedded. 
As they bore a general resemblance to some forms of Alveolina , a well-known genus of 
Foraminifera, from which, indeed, they seemed to differ in point of size rather than in 
any structural peculiarities revealed by a cursory examination, they were assigned by 
their discoverer to that genus ; and, having attracted but little subsequent attention, have 
been left by Palaeontologists in the same position. 
24. In Mr. Loftus’s memoirf these fossils are spoken of as specimens “ of a gigantic 
species of Alveolina 3 inches in length;” but no further mention is made of them. Messrs. 
W. K. Parker and T. Rupert Jones, in one of their earlier papers on the “Nomencla- 
ture of the Foraminifera” J, make a passing allusion to them. Amongst their notes on 
the fossil forms of Alveolina , especially those of the Nummulitic Period, they say, “ The 
largest we have seen was collected in Persia by the late Mr. W. K. Loftus, and is three 
inches long and an inch and a half in diameter.” The two sentences quoted appear to 
comprise all that has hitherto been written on the subject of the present paper. 
25. A portion of Mr. Loftus’s geological collection was presented, some time after his 
decease, to the Museum of the Natural History Society in Newcastle; and finding 
amongst other things a number of examples of this supposed Alveolina , I asked, and 
readily obtained, permission of the Committee to make such preparations from them as 
might be requisite for the elucidation of their structure. 
26. A very slight examination by means of transparent sections convinced me that, not- 
withstanding a general similarity in external contour, the internal structure was distinct 
in many important characters from either of the previously known genera of fusiform 
Foraminifera. In Alveolina the shell-wall is opaque, homogeneous, and Porcellanous ; in 
* Mr. Loftus’s collections were made in the years 1849-52, during the progress of a Joint Commission ap- 
pointed hy the English, Eussian, Turkish, and Persian Governments for the demarkation of the Turko-Persian 
Frontier. 
t “On the Geology of Portions of the Turko-Persian Frontier and Districts adjoining,” hy William Kennett 
Loftus, Esq., F.G.S., in Quart. Joum. Geol. Soc. Lond., August 1855, vol. xi . ; foot-note, p. 285. 
+ Annals and Mag. Nat. Hist., Ser. 3, vol. v. (1860), p. 182. 
