Ocean, twenty-one in the Gulf of Mexico, seven in the Caribbean Sea, one in the South Pacific, and five in the North Pacific. The depths at these stations vary from 7 to 2512 fathoms. The classification followed is that of Mr. Brady in the 'Challenger' reports.
Zoologists seem sometimes to forget these primitive forms of animal life, and yet how little we know of their life-histories! "How the function of nutrition is accomplished, and the nature and condition of the organic material used as food by these minute animals is not yet determined." "Of the process of reproduction little is known beyond the fact of multiplication by gemmation and fission." The Foraminifera are therefore still in search of their interpreter. Their iconographer has not been undiscoverable. This most interesting memoir is illustrated by no fewer than eighty beautiful plates.
Most English readers will remember these animals as having formed the pabulum of Huxley's classical lecture "On a Piece of Chalk."
This is a reprint from the columns of our contemporary 'Knowledge,' and is devoted to the consideration of a form of life whose position in classification is still sub judice, being claimed alike by botanists and zoologists. We recently ('Zoologist,' 1899, p. 524) drew attention to a volume on the same subject by Prof. Macbride. It is owing to these diverse claims that the subject becomes matter for our pages. The present authors, in discussing the affinities of the Mycetozoa = Myxomycetes of Macbride, and the question as to whether they belong to the vegetable or animal domains—which, after all, reduced to their primitive conditions, are practically convertible terms—pronounce a qualified decision. "It almost seems as if the Myxies were a vagrant tribe that wander sometimes on the one side, and sometimes on the other side of the border-line—like nomads wandering across the frontier of two settled and adjoining states, to neither of which they belong. They would seem to begin life as animals, and end it as vegetables."
