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The air-vesicles are completely plugged by this material, and very interesting specimens may be obtained by careful dissection, in the shape of casts of the bronchial tubes and air-vesicles, clustered together like bunches of grapes.

The lava consists of dark- greyish, harsh rocks, intermediate in character between trachyte and basalt, containing glassy feldspar, olivine, and a little mica, and sometimes amygdaloidal with zeolite: the basis is either quite compact, or crenulated with air-vesicles arranged in laminae.

There are, however, not a few exceptions; it often happens that some of them increase or diminish in volume much faster than others; sometimes one may increase while another diminishes; all the changes, however, are throughout unquestionably intentional. The object of the air-vesicles is to bring the animal into such a position that it can take fast hold of something with its pseudopodia.

When this has been obtained, the air disappears without our being able to discover any other reason for its disappearance than the fact that it is no longer needed. . . . If we bear these circumstances in mind, we can almost always tell whether an arcella will develop air-vesicles or no; and if it has already developed them, we can tell whether they will increase or diminish . . . The arcellae, in fact, in this power of altering their specific gravity possess a mechanism for raising themselves to the top of the water, or lowering themselves to the bottom at will.

Prentiss, in Science, October 3, 1890, has collected numerous instances of sudden canities, several of which will be given: "In the Canada Journal of Medical Science, 1882, p. 113, is reported a case of sudden canities due to business-worry. The microscope showed a great many air-vesicles both in the medullary substance and between the medullary and cortical substance.