REPORT ON SPIRULA. 
3 
deposited in the Sydney Museum, 1 and consequently could not be made the subject of 
anatomical research. 
As to the complete Spirula taken by the “Blake” in the West Indian Seas 2 
(represented in PL II. figs. 1, 2), it is, at the present moment, lost, without having 
been dissected. Therefore the capture, during the voyage of the Challenger, of an 
entire specimen of Spirula, wdiich was entrusted to Professor Huxley, has been considered 
one of the happy zoological results of this Expedition. 
From the above enumeration it appears that up to the present time only five complete 
individuals of Spirula have been under observation (not one of which was, however, taken 
alive), the two specimens (male and female) studied by Owen, that belonging to the Sydney 
Museum, and the two others which were collected by the Challenger and the “ Blake.” 
In some public and private collections (notably in London) there are more or less 
important fragments of Spirula not mentioned in literature, but, like the specimen in 
the Sydney Museum, they cannot be made the subjects of scientific investigation. 
However, two individuals—unfortunately also incomplete—were in the hands of 
former captain of the navy at Nantes, 3 who, still more strongly than the owner of the 
Spirula studied by Owen in 1879, refused to trust them to a Zoologist. But Professor 
Giard, who kept watch over these specimens, was able to acquire them on the death of their 
possessor ; thanks to him these Spirulse did not become the prey of a public collection. 
He has been so good as to entrust them to me and to permit me to dissect the larger and 
more complete of the two ; upon this material my personal observations have been based. 
Under these circumstances I have undertaken to prepare the Eeport upon the 
specimen of Spirula taken by the Challenger Expedition. Zoologists will join with 
me in regretting that this publication has not been made by Professor Huxley himself; 
but I shall be excused for supplying his place here, when it is known that for years past 
he had formally renounced the idea of publishing the figures already prepared, and thus 
these could not have been published without the intervention of a collaborator. 
Professor Huxley has been good enough to furnish me with various explanations 
relative to the figures, and, with the aid of my own observations, I am able to present an 
anatomical description of Spirula , giving sufficiently precise details of the majority of 
the points of its organisation, in spite of certain deficiencies due to the rarity of the 
material and its state of preservation. 
P. P. 
1 Angas, On the marine molluscan Fauna of the Province of South Australia, with a list of all the species 
known up to the present time, &c. ( Proc. Zool. Soc. London, 1865, p. 157). 
2 Agassiz, On the dredging operations carried on from December 1878 to March 10, 1879, by the U.S. 
Coast Survey steamer “ Blake ” (Bull. Mus. Comp. Zool., vol. v., 1879, p. 298) ; Agassiz, Three Cruises of the 
U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey steamer “Blake” (ibid., vol. xv., 1888, p. 61). 
3 These specimens had been collected in 1861, but their locality is uncertain. Professor Giard supposes 
that they had been taken in the Atlantic, in the neighbourhood of the Sargasso Sea (Giard, A propos de 1’ Animal 
•de la Spirule, Comptes rendus Soc. Biol. Paris, ser. 9, t. v., 1893, p. 886). 
