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anemones, and is a great ornament in an aquarium, creeping about the side of the tank, and expanding its base into an irregularly elliptical form (fig. 11). I have seen one with its base expanded to a length of five inches and a breadth of two and a half. In this specimen the marginal spherules were pinkish white.

The Dahlia Wartlet (Tealia crassicornis) is abundant all round the coast, at or near the verge of

low water, and is often left dry, when numbers may be seen huddled together, with their stomachs extruded, forming unsightly jelly-like masses. But they are as often to be seen in the pools with their tentacles fully expanded (fig. 12), or with those organs retracted, and the body covered with fragments of shells and sand. I have never seen this species appear to such advantage and in such plenty as in the large pool near the "Boiling Caldron" at Spanish Point.

It is literally paved with individuals of all sizes and colours; some are fully six inches in diameter, if not more, and there are many with large tapering snow-white tentacles, which contrast pleasantly with the ordinary red or grey forms. The great size of this species prevents its being a desirable inmate of a small aquarium, and a slight injury to the base in detaching it is extremely likely to cause death.

I have exhausted all the space permitted to me on this subject, but I cannot conclude this brief sketch of some of the more common of these "flowers of the ocean," which are so truly animal-flowers as to have deceived insects themselves, without quoting an anecdote illustrative of this fact, as narrated by Mr. Jonathan Crouch. "On one occasion, while watching a specimen that was covered merely by a rim of water, a bee, wandering near, darted through the water to the mouth of the animal, evidently mistaking the creature for a flower; and though it struggled a great deal to get free, was retained till it was drowned, and was then swallowed."

A wide-mouthed bottle, a walking-stick, and an india-rubber band to fasten it to one end of the stick, are the only tools needed by the microscopist to enable him to secure an abundance of aquatic animals for his investigation.

The first dip into a neighbouring pond or road-side ditch, at this season of the year, will not fail to furnish him with Daphniæ, Cyperides, and Cyclops in abundance, sufficient, in fact, to occupy his attention for weeks to come. Such a gathering we made the other day, which, on examination, proved to be rich in that little and best-known Entomostraeon, the Cyclops quadricornis.

Let not the reader start in alarm; the creature in question is not in the most remote way connected, except by name, with those one-eyed monsters of heathen mythology whom Vulcan employed to forge thunderbolts for Jove; but is a small one-eyed crustacean, of elegant form and jerking movements, and withal clad in a transparent horny armour, composed of many pieces dovetailed and jointed together with a skill and nicety sufficient to have excited envy in the breast of an ancient armourer. The armourer in which the Cyclops is thus encased answers a double purpose. It protects the soft and gelatinous body from injury, and it serves as an external skeleton for the attachment of its various muscles and articulations. In the species before us this covering consists of ten plates or segments. Four of these encase the head and thorax in such a manner that no division, as in the Insecta, is perceptible between these two parts of the body. The remaining six segments are devoted to the protection of the abdomen, &c. It is in the first and largest segment, which is somewhat buckler-shaped, that we find centred the solitary eye from which the animal derives its fanciful name of Cyclops. On each side of this organ are situated the double antennæ, which gives to the little crustacean its specific name of Quadricornis.

In the female Cyclops (fig. 3) the superior or largest pair of antennæ are light and flexible organs, being long and tapering, with a graceful curve or sweep. The articulations, which are numerous,