The daily morning journal and courier., 1897-11-05
MONEY STONES

The Sussex coast, near Selsea Bill, is uninteresting to the ordinary tourist. It is flat and sometimes almost marshy, rising at most but a few feet over sea level, and terminating above the shore in little step which can hardly be called a cliff. But while walking along the margin of Bracklesham bay the observant passer by will no- tice here and there on the sand some grayish disk-like objects, about the size of a sixpence or a shill- ing. They are thicker in the middle than at the edge, towards which the surface often very gently curves, some times showing slight flexure, like a biscuit that has warped a little in the baking. A closer inspection shows that these are not chance forms, mere imi- tative sports of nature" as many such things were called by our forefathers, but are a fossil organism.
 In some countries-for they are found over large area of the Old World they run to a greater size, and are often quite as big as a florin, being sometimes almost a quarter of an inch thick at the central part. Their resem- blance to a coin-though we must ad- init it is very rough one-has obtain ed for them the name of nummulites, or money-stones. In those larger spsci- ments the internal structure is more easily seen than in such as are picked up on the Sussex coast, though in the latter it can be made out by a keen eye or by the use of a very ordinary lens. A nummulite, when split through the central plane of the disk, reveals a structure resembling rudely that shown by a section through the middle of a nautilus, or more closely that of fossil ammonite, except that the spiral takes a greater number of turns, and the chambers are shorter and much more numerous than in even the latter shell. But in the nummu:lte a section made at right angles to this-followin a curve of longitude instead of the equator-reveals very different struc- ture. The shell is built of several layers of chambers, one outside another, each layer consisting of a ring of rather crescentic or saddle-shaped chamber, connected top and bottom by curving floors, or flats, the cells in which are extremely low.
 These nummulites are some of the largest members of vast group of organism which has been from a re- mote antiquity, and still are very abundant in the world. These organisms are by no means made after one pat tern. Some, though they are the excep- tion, occupy houses with only a single room; the majority have several, and not a few an enormous number. The cells may be in a row, may form a spiral, or may be doubled up. They may be placed in the more complicated houses, on one floor or on more, but in a good many cases the plan presents resemblance to one of the coiled-up mollusks, and particularly to the nautilus, or some of it's relations, with the difference, however that the shells in question are commonly very reduced copies-in many cases hardly so big as a small pins head. But their structure at first sight seems, in many case, even more complicated than any of the cephalopods, as naturalists call this, the highest order of the mollusks; so that these little chambered shells, in the earlier third of the present century, were actually classed with the cephalo- pods.
 But these little creatures come at the very bottom of the animal kingdom, and their test, as the hard part is called in science, differs very much from the shell of a mollusk. It is not always made of carbonate of lime, though that is so in a great number of cases In this grains of sand are often embedded, like pebbles in mortar, and not seldom these make up the whole test, being cemented together by some organic material. The test sometimes has but one open ing; sometimes, however, it's walls are riddled by an enormous number of ex- tremely minute pores, SIS if every cham Der were provided with hundreds of tubes for ventilation, or built of per forated bricks. From this structure, though it Is, not always present, naturalists have named the order to which these creatures belong the Foraminifera, or hole-bearers. But, intricate as the test and it's structures may be, nothings can be simpler than the animal itself. It has neither mouth, nor brain, nor nerves; neither head, nor tail, nor even stomach; it is hardly more than a bit of living jelly. Pro- longations of this extend through the holes from cell to cell, and for some l little distance beyond the outer she'll But these jelly threads are not even provided with a skin, and it two come 1 in contact they adhere. In this way the | creature grows chamber by chamber,
 or layer by layer. But notwithstanding this simplicity of organization, the tests | themselves, especially in the nummuli-
 tes, have a rather complicated struc- ture. Into the details of this we need l mot z.x. q