214 Miscellaneous. Columba Tvrtur, Charadrius Hiaticula, Totanus hypoleucos, Glarcola pratincola, shot at Xanthus, the " Partridge SnijDe" of the Turks. — Larus argentatus, Tadorna rutila. These specimens are placed in the Museum of the Natural History Society at Nottingham, ON THE GENERA JEGILOPS AND TRITJCVM. From the extreme resemblance of the fruit of JEgilops with the grains of cultivated wheat, some botanists have supposed that the latter was merely an JEgilops modified by cultivation. M. Esprit Fabre having found some plants of JEgilops triticoides last year, in the environs of Agde, sowed the fruits of them in his garden, and obtained a plant in which the characters of jEgilops almost entirely disappeared to give place to those of Triticum. It is not yet quite a Triticum, nor is it an jEgilops. Next yeai* M. Fabre intends to sow the grains he gathered this year, and to continue the observa-tions he has begun. — Comptes Rendus, August 1839. No. 7. ON THE ANIMAL NATURE OF THE OSCILLATORIA, In a late Number of the ' Annals,' p. 70, we drew the attention of our readers to the problematical nature of the Oscillatoria ; since then we have received the April number of the ' Annales des Sciences Naturelles,' in which Dr. linger, in communicating the description of a new Spirillum, makes the following observation on the nature of these curious and interesting forms. I did not propose, says the learned Doctor, in making this communication to enter into a compa-rative examination of the Oscillatoria, but to combat a system, ac-cording to which the forms at present known ought to be necessarily referred to some vegetable genus, composed of elements certainly very heterogeneous. When Agardh, speaking of some Oscillatoria* which move with the greatest ease, states that they have an arti-culated head which they move after the manner of a beak, he cer-tainly by this points to an animal nature. The characters assigned by Agardh to the Oscillatoria animalis of Karlsbad are far more striking : according to his expressions, it does not oscillate ; it has not the pendulum-like movement ; but it crawls like a worm, and turns itself in every direction. It is also able to move itself freely in the water, differing thus from the others, which are only able to do this when they rest on the common substratum. It moves the head, which is linguiform, as the mollusca move their tentacula ; in a word, animal movement cannot be denied them. Moreover, if we * Ueber die gegen meinc Ansichten in der Physiologic der Algen ge-machten Eiuwiirfe. — Nova Acta Nat, Curios, vol. xiv. part II. p. 756.
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