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302 Of the Transactions in this form, four parts have been issued, including the fifteen sessions from 1835 to 1850, giving abstracts of large number of papers, many of them of great local interest.

The Society was never more vigorous and flourishing than it is at the present moment. It has about 300 members subscribing a guinea each, about twenty lady associates subscribing half a guinea, and about twenty-five honorary members, all except one residing at a distance. Its sectional committees, established in 1849 for the pursuit of special branches of Art and Science, but most of which remained for many years in a dormant state, are wakening to real life. The Council have undertaken several additional courses of educational lectures for the general benefit of the town, as well as the members, The Corporation have recently provided, partly by public subscription, and partly from the borough estate, a new block of buildings in connection with the Museum, in which a very handsome Lecture Hall, seating 500 persons, is devoted to the use of the Society, and there can be little doubt that when the Midland Union holds its annual meeting in Leicester next May, it will receive a very warm and hearty welcome from the Literary and Philosophical Society, under the auspices of its President for the year, George Stevenson, Esq., who is one of its oldest and most valued members, as Alderman, and is ex-Mayor of the borough.

 At the meeting of the Birmingham Natural History and Microsoppical Society, held June 11th, 1878. (see "Midland Naturalist” at p. 202,) I exhibited the very rare Rotifer Melicerta pilula, or, more correctly, Œcistes pilula, which I had then just found in Sutton Park. The history of this species appears to be as follows:—In the journal of the Quekett Club, 1868, this animal was described by Mr. J. G. Tatem as a variety of Melicerta, in which “only rudely shaped excrementitious masses adherent to the gelatinous investment are observed." but no distinctive specific name was suggested for it. This description was accompanied by drawings, which are fairly accurate so far as they go.

In "Science Gossip," 1872, Dr. F. Collins described the same organism as a new species, and gave a very incorrect account of it, stating that "the pellet with which the animal builds its tube is formed in a kind of sac, situated at the lower extremity of the abdomen,” &c., In the "Monthly Microscopical Journal,” July 1st, 1872, Mr. C. Cubitt takes this species as illustrative of the structural differences between Flosculariæ and Melicertidæ, and speaks of it as a form with which he had bean acquainted for some years, and which he had called M. pilula, from the fact that "she fortifies the gelatinous basis of the theca with her own excrementitious pitules.”

In this paper the author preposed to divide the whole thecated suction of Rotifers into two families only, distinguished primarily by the