On the introduction of Professor HERDMAN, the following Note was read:

ON ASCOPODARIA NODOSA, (sp. nov.)

BY JOSEPH LOMAS, Assoc. N.S.S.

Characters.

Zoarium consists of a slender chitinous stolon, from which branches, bearing polypides, are given off alternately. Peduncle chitinous, hollow, expanding below into a muscular swelling. A second muscular swelling is found in the middle, and a third at the top, just under the head.

This form is described in the Liverpool Marine Biology Committee's Report (Part I, p. 190, pl. iii, fig. 2) under the name of Pedicellina gracilis, var. nodosa.

Further research, however, leads me to believe that it should be placed in the new genus lately founded by Busk, Ascopodaria ("Challenger" Report, vol. xvii).

The characteristic features of the new genus mostly reside in the stem, which is chitinous, tubular, and rigid, and joins the stolon by a broad barrel-shaped dilatation.

In A. nodosa, the "basal cylinder" is broad below, and tapers suddenly near the top, becoming continuous with the stem. It is not annulated like A. discreta.

Separating the basal cylinder from the stem is a septum, which stretches nearly across, leaving a perforation in the middle. The whole swelling is filled with muscular tissue, which is prolonged for a short distance on each side into the stolon; and a septum, similar to the one in the stem, separates the muscular portion from the tubular stolon on each side. The septum may serve to give attachment to the muscles which have to do with the movement of the peduncle.

The most striking feature, however, is the presence of a second swelling in the middle of the stem, muscular in its nature; and there is a third and smaller one under the head.

The portion between the basal cylinder and the medial swelling is about the same length in all the specimens I have examined, but the part between the medial swelling and the head varies very greatly.

In one colony there was, along with the ordinary type, a form without a medial swelling, but the length of the stem was equal to the first joint in the others.

This may be an imperfectly developed specimen, and it would seem to indicate that, as the individual grows, the head swelling becomes the medial one by an elongation of the upper joint. The differences in length of the upper joint also favour this view.

The stem is described by authors as a rigid chitinous tube. Now chitin, being produced by the ectodermic cells, cannot be regarded as supplying living connection between the different parts of the zoarium. But under a high power a very delicate tissue of elongated nucleated cells is seen, inside the chitinous covering, connecting the different muscular parts in the stem and stolon.*

The specimens were collected by Professor Herdman, off Port Erin, in the summer of 1885, and were adherent to seaweeds. (Ptilota, etc.)

It has not since been observed in the L. M. B. C.'s area.

Mr. W. WATSON RUTHERFORD read a short Paper on a "Proposed Act of Parliament for securing indefeasible title and cheap transfer of Corporation property in Liverpool."

* Busk has observed the same "parenchymatous tissue" in other Species of Ascopodaria.

FOURTH ORDINARY MEETING.

ROYAL INSTITUTION, November 29th, 1886.

Dr. CARTER, President, in the Chair.

Professor HERDMAN, D.Sc., exhibited a mass of specimens of the gregarious Annelid Sabellaria alveolata, from Hilbre Island, and explained how the worms, by building up stiff tubes from sand grains, formed bosses and reefs along the shore between 'tide-marks. The specimens shewed particularly well the direction of growth of the mass, and the manner in which new tubes are built up alongside the old ones. It is deposited in the Zoological Museum of University College, Liverpool.

Professor HERDMAN, D.Sc., also exhibited an interesting abnormal specimen of Porania pulvillus, Gray (= Goniaster templetoni, Forb.), which he had dredged off the North Coast of Arran in September last.

The star-fish is rather more than 5 cm. in diameter, and one of the five short rays (that opposite to the madreporite) when viewed from the aboral surface is seen to be distinctly bifurcated about 1 cm. from its termination. On examining the oral surface, it is found that the ambulacral groove of the abnormal ray divides into two branches at a distance of 2 cm. from the edge of the mouth. One of these branches runs along one of the forks of the ray to its extremity without further complication; but the other branch, belonging to the second fork, divides again 2 mm. from the first bifurcation so as to form two tracts, which unite with one another 3 mm. further on, thus enclosing a small piece of the ordinary integument in an ambulacral area. Finally, this ambulacral area divides once more close to the tip of the ray. Consequently there are three bifurcations of the ambulacral area in a space of not more than 1 cm. in length.

As there are no signs of injury or disease in the specimen, the abnormal condition seems to have been caused by a tendency to dichotomous division, like that seen in the rays of Crinoids and of the Astrophytidæ, in other groups of the Echinodermata.

The specimen is now deposited in the Zoological Museum of University College, Liverpool.

The following paper was read on

INORGANIC FORMS.

BY THE REV. H. H. HIGGINS, M.A.

Ir may be needless to point out that the inorganic forms which constitute my subject do not include artificial products, or remains in which life once dwelt. A dead shell, for example, is the result of forces peculiar to life, and cannot appropriately be classed with inorganic forms.

Again, there are crystalline or prismatic forms in nature, numberless in kind, many of them exquisite in outline, gorgeous in colour, and dazzling in brilliancy, having a distinct science of their own, dear to mineralogists, and occupying in their treatises a special department known as crystallography—a subject out of all proportion with any space that could be given to it in the few remarks I have to make.

Once again, although no portion of solid matter can be regarded as truly amorphous, or without form, yet by far the greater part of inorganic objects are so devoid of symmetry, and have had their configuration determined by so complicated an action of various laws, that, practically, they are without definable shape, and may be regarded as without form, e.g., a grain of sand, a lump of chalk, or an island.

Lastly, liquids have but few and simple forms: a drop, an eddy, a wave, a sphere-as water thrown upon an incan

descent surface. Gaseous matter has no form, except that of the receptacle in which it is confined.

Our exceptions and eliminations have been very extensive. Yet, when these are excluded, nature has modes of expressing, through the phenomena of inorganic forms, the capacities and tendencies of matter, independently of the forces of life.

We are familiar with some of the structures which play so important a part in the building up of the living body. The terms, e.g., endoderm and ectoderm, express, under countless varieties of condition, the result of a process of organic lamination, or an arrangement of matter in layers or thin plates, lying one over another.

Initiated in the gastræa condition of the embryo, continued in the development of a mesoderm, or intermediate layer, and wondrously differentiated in all the tissues and membranes of the adult form, lamination is one of the chief characters of organisation from the Protozoon to man.

The elements or materials of the living body are identical with those with which the chemist and the mineralogist have to deal; and there was once a time when the hydrogen and the oxygen, the nitrogen and the carbon, the iron, the lime, the sulphur, and the phosphorus of an organism had not yet constituted Bioplasm, nor taken part in the development of a living creature.

But probably there has never been a time, at all events it must have been æons in the past, when these elements had not a tendency to produce definite forms, by processes such as lamination or nodular concretion; and this after a fashion not explained by gravitation or any other known law.

When, therefore, the molecules of matter and their products were first required to construct the tissues, the layers, and the vesicles essential to the living organism, it