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Show 134 DR. J. S. BOWERBANK ON SPONGES. [Feb. 13, that department kept an old hat by him in which a large number of single letters cut out of old catalogues were stored, and that when he wanted a name for a new genus he used to dip his hand therein and take out a pinch of letters, which were scattered before him, and out of which, by a few judicious changes of arrangement, he formed the required name. From the nature of a number of the names of the new genera proposed by Dr. Gray in his arrangement of the sponges, it would appear highly probable that he has found the old hat and its contents in some one of the out-of-the-way corners in his department, and again applied it to its original use. There are certain animadversions in the author's paper on my own course of proceeding in treating on the sponges both British and foreign, to which I must beg leave to say a few words in reply. Dr. Gray complains (p. 496) of m y not having referred to any of the exotic sponges described by him in the ' Proceedings of the Zoological Society,' and of m y not having described the sponges in the British Museum. I have carefully gone over all the British species in that collection, and have referred to them, when necessary, in m y ' Monograph of British Sponges' (as, for instance, vol. ii. pp. 275, 277, 2/9, 281, 364, and elsewhere), and I should have described the sponges which Dr. Gray has written upon with pleasure had he requested me to do so. But all these specimens were described and named by him first and shown to m e afterwards, and when I found he was thus skimming the cream of the subject I determined not to accept the leavings. I will not now point out the numerous errors regarding these species into which Dr. Gray has fallen, as it is very probable that I shall have to recur to their descriptions at a future period. Dr. Gray (p. 500) objects to the large number of species of British Sponges in m y genera Halichondria, Hymedesmia, and Isodictya. Had I applied Halichondria as Dr. Johnston and previous writers had established it, instead of having 28 species of that genus in m y ' Monograph of the British Spongiadse' there would have been 169 species. The number thus designated in Dr. Johnston's ' History of British Sponges' is 37. The Doctor's objection to the large number of species in the genera he names is plausible ; but it is Nature and not I that am answerable for this difficulty ; but in stating this objection he does not mention that the species of each of these genera are subdivided, by means of the various forms of the primary skeleton-spicula, into four or five divisions each, and that the greatest number of species in one group is 28 in the genus Isodictya. The author even extends his objection to m y genus Dictyocylindrus, in which there are 11 species, and these subdivided into 4 groups, the largest of which contains 5 species. The learned author quite forgets that the same inevitable difficulty occurs in botany. In the fourth edition of Babington's ' Manual of British Botany,' we find there are 19 species of Roses, 32 of Salix, 33 of Hieracium, 41 of Rubus, and 72 of Carex. In all these cases the difficulty is very much lessened by judicious subdivisions of the respective genera. The author also objects to m y terminology ; but without a definite |