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Show 906 DR. BOWERBANK ON HYALONEMA LUSITANICUM. [NOV. 28, 24th, dismisses the consideration of my paper on "Hyalonema mirabilis," read on the 10th of January, in not the most courteous style imaginable. In a short note to his paper (p. 120) he observes, " Dr. Bowerbank has written a long and diffuse paper to attempt to prove his position, when a cut in the polype-cell would have settled the question. It is a pity he did not recollect King Charles's question about the fish and the water." This style of pooh-poohing disputed facts in natural history is neither just nor gentlemanly, and in the present case it is at variance with the truth. Dr. Gray was invited by m e to be present at the reading of the paper on the 10th of January, but he declined to appear on that occasion. Had he been there he would have known that I had, not once only, but repeatedly, cut into his supposed polype-cells, and that the results of their examinations were duly described and their anatomical peculiarities figured in illustration of the descriptions of them. Neither then, nor since, has Dr. Gray attempted to disprove a single fact advanced by m e in that paper. In conclusion I may observe that, since the reading of a short supplemental paper on March 28th, entitled " Additional Observations on Hyalonema mirabile," I have been fortunate in obtaining from Mr. Jonathan Couch, of Polperro, several dried specimens of Zoanthus couchii, in which the polypes were living when dredged up at Shetland, and in which the motive fibres passing from the polypes have their distal extremities attached in a circle to the inner surface of the polype-case of the animal. The terminal portions of these fibres have a stout, dilated-cylindrical, and very fleshy appearance. They are attached to the inner surface of the mouth of the polypidom by their apices only; and from these points they pass inward to the upper part of the polype to which their bases are attached, and down the sides of which each of them may be traced for a considerable distance, gradually diminishing in diameter as they pass downward on the body of the animal. As the end to be attained by means of these organs, in both Zoanthus and Hyalonema, is precisely the same, that of opening and closing a purse-like orifice on the apex of a cylindrical tube, Nature, as might have been expected, has adopted nearly the same mode of action in either case-that of a series of motive fibres, the distal ends of which are attached in a circle around the orifice to be contracted ; and there is just that difference in their structure and mode of disposition that is appropriate to the conditions of each separate animal. In Hyalonema, destitute of polypes, they are imbedded between the outer and inner tissues of the corium of the organ ou which they are destined to operate; while in Zoanthus they are not immersed in the tissues of the case or polypidom of the animal, but are parts of the enclosed polype within it, and their distal ends only are attached to the oral opening of the external case, while the remaining portions of these organs are attached to the outer integument of the retractile polype within the polypidom. These organs in Zoanthus are few in number, and very much |