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Grant, who, in a later article on Flustra, made some allusion to a paper read by Darwin before the Linnean Society on a small discovery which he had made by the aid of a "wretched microscope" to the effect that the so-called ova of Flustra were really larvæ and had the power of independent action by means of cilia.
Great masses of the Flustra, as it is called, line the bottom and sides of my pool. They grow in tufts, standing upright on the rock, and looking exactly like hard gray seaweeds, while there is nothing to lead you to suspect that they are anything else.
The papers which were read to our little society were not printed, so that I had not the satisfaction of seeing my paper in print; but I believe Dr. Grant noticed my small discovery in his excellent memoir on Flustra. I was also a member of the Royal Medical Society, and attended pretty regularly; but as the subjects were exclusively medical, I did not much care about them.
Now a moderate-sized leaf of flustra measures about three square inches, taking all the rounded lobes into account, so you will see we get forty thousand, three hundred and twenty as a rough estimate of the number of beings on this one leaf.
Of Zoophytes, some presented themselves of the genera Antipathes, Millepora; Cellaria, Flustra two species, Melobesia, Retepora, Acamarchis, Lafoea, Aglaophenia, Dynamena fives species, Clytia four species, and Folliculina, two species.
This was that the so-called ova of Flustra had the power of independent movement by means of cilia, and were in fact larvae. In another short paper I showed that the little globular bodies which had been supposed to be the young state of Fucus loreus were the egg-cases of the wormlike Pontobdella muricata.
"It was a mere worn dead fragment, but its surface was covered with brown, crimson, and yellow Nulliporæ, many small Actinæ, and soft branching Corallines, Flustra, and Eschara, and delicate Reteporæ, looking like beautiful lace-work carved in ivory.
Yet the immense quantities of Flustra thrown up after a storm indicate dredging ground at no great distance outside; its rocks, uninteresting as they are compared with our Devonians, have yielded to the industry and science of M. Tumanowicz a vast number of sea- weeds and sponges.
The second, the Sea-mat or Flustra, looks like a crumpled drab-colored seaweed, but is really composed of many thousands of grottos, the homes of tiny sea-animals. Cydippe Pileus.
A notice of the ciliated germs of Flustra, communicated to the Plinian Society in 1826, was the first fruits of Darwin's half century of scientific work. Occasional attendance at the Wernerian Society brought him into relation with that excellent ornithologist the elder Macgillivray, and enabled him to see and hear Audubon.
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