Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 1 (1877).djvu/210

184 found nesting was the Stone Curlew, or Thick-knee.— (Cotton House, Marlborough).

—On February 14th a Pilot-fish (Gasterosteus ductor) was taken in a herring-net off Plymouth, and on the 20th of that month an immense shoal of Gray Mullet was captured when the water was pumped out of the "graving" or dry dock of the Great Western Docks, Plymouth. This shoal consisted of many thousand fish, which were sold for the large sum of £215 for the Paris market. A large number of these fish measured nearly twenty inches in length, and weighed four or five pounds each, many of them much more.— (8, Lower Durnford Street, Stonehouse, Plymouth).

.—I have lately received a specimen of the Angular Crab (Gonoplax angulata) captured in Veryan Bay, near Falmouth.— (Penzance).

[This Crab has been frequently taken on the South coast of England and on the Irish coast, but does not appear to have been met with on the eastern seaboard or in Scotland.—]

—One of my farmers, who is very observant in matters of Natural History, told me that about a month ago, on taking in a straw-rick, he had found a party of five or six frogs all comfortably nestled together on the very apex of the rick, which was some fifteen or sixteen feet high, and that he had found them in the same kind of place more than once. This says a good deal for the frog's power of climbing, for the straw having been ricked as it came only from the threshing machine, they could not have been carried up in it inadvertently. I did not know before they had such a claim to be ranked amongst the Scansores.— (Britford Vicarage, Salisbury).

 

February 18, 1877.—Prof. Allman, F.R.S., President, in the chair.

Messrs. William Burns, E.T. Gardner, J.W.S. Micklejohn, Professor W.W. Harrington of Michigan, U.S., the Piev. John Stubbs.and Sir Charles W. Strickland, Bart., were elected Fellows at this meeting.

Mr. Arthur Lister exhibited under the microscope a most interesting example of the plasmodium of one of the lowly-organized Myxomycetæ. This common mass of protoplasm well illustrated the peculiar amœboid movements, and the object gave rise to an animated conversational discussion as to its oft-contested animal or vegetable nature. Professor Haeckel evades this knotty point by provisionally grouping it along with certain other doubtful organisms in his kingdom Prostita.

