130 Marshall Ward. — On the Characters , or 
any kind, and not arranged in chains. Endospores in 
cocci, and smaller than they are. 
Neisseria. Cocci paired. 
Staphylococcus. Cocci in botryoidal groups. 
Micrococcus. Cocci solitary, or scattered without 
order in amorphous zoogloea-masses. 
Unquestionably a large number of the species are ‘bad’; 
that is to say they are so imperfectly described that one 
cannot forthwith recognise a given form as belonging to a 
species recorded in the monumental volume under review ; 
but it is by no means the least valuable function of a work 
like this to show in what directions more remains to be done, 
and this alone would have justified the publication of the one 
hundred and sixty odd pages of closely packed, and industri- 
ously compiled, information in this book. 
But the treatise in question does much more than that. It 
shows what great advances are being made in the discovery 
of new types of Schizomycetes, as a glance at the table will 
show, and how (as a natural consequence) new ideas as to the 
relative value of characters have to be entertained. 
This brings me to another phase of the subject in general. 
The real difficulty in classifying organisms like Schizomy- 
cetes is not so much that they are so small, especially in 
these days of homogeneous immersions and improved staining 
and illuminating methods, as that (largely consequent on 
their minuteness, it may be admitted) they exhibit so few 
morphological characters. A Fungus, like Mucor or Peni - 
cillium , has organs and differentiated parts which can be 
described very definitely ; but when one deals with minute 
structures like Micrococcus or Bacterium the case is different. 
Now the researches of the last fifteen years or so have 
brought to light numerous points which can be made use of 
in classifying these tiny specks of living matter, quite apart 
from their shapes and sizes, and those of their spores, capsules, 
zoogloeae, &c., and Trevisan and De-Toni have made consider- 
able use of these accessory characters, which, by the bye, we 
