Ehrenberg himself, towards the end of his long and laborious life, collected the results of the systematic and palæontological researches, which he had begun thirty-seven years previously (L. N. 16, pp. 3-12) into the Polycystina, in two large works (L. N. 24, 25). The first treatise (L. N. 24, 1872) contains the Mikrogeologische Studien über das Kleinste Leben der Meeres-Tiefgründe aller Zonen und dessen geologischen Einfluss, with a list of 279 Polycystina observed by him from the deep-sea, as well as figures of 127 species. The second work (L. N. 25, 1875) contains the Fortsetzung der Mikrogeologischen Studien, mit specieller Rücksicht auf den Polycystinen-Mergel von Barbados; the list of fossil Polycystina observed by him includes 325 species, of which 26 are still extant; 282 of them are figured on the thirty plates accompanying the memoir. By means of these numerous figures, as well as by the appended systematic and chorological tables, Ehrenberg furnished a welcome {clxxxiv}supplement to the numerous communications regarding the Polycystina, which he had made to the Berlin Academy since 1838, and which he had published in his Mikrogeologie in 1854. It will always be the merit of this zealous and indefatigable microscopist that he first called attention to the great wealth of forms existing in this class; he separated systematically about 500 species, and published drawings of about 400; in addition to which he was the first to lay stress upon the great chorological and geological importance of the Radiolaria. With these systematic and descriptive, chorological and palæontological works, however, which relate exclusively to the Polycystina, the merits of the famous naturalist of Berlin are exhausted as regards this class of animals. Of the organisation of the Radiolaria, Gottfried Ehrenberg remained entirely ignorant up till his death in 1876. All that a number of famous naturalists had observed during a quarter of a century as to the structure and life-history of the Radiolaria, all the important discoveries of Huxley (1851), Johannes Müller (1858), Claparède (1858), Cienkowski (1871), and many others (L. N. 1-22), and all that I had published in my Monograph (1862) on the basis of three years' study of their anatomy and physiology--all this Ehrenberg ignored, or rather, he regarded it all as worthless rubbish of science, as a chaos of devious errors, resting upon incomplete observations and false conclusions. His strange "special considerations regarding the Polycystina" (L. N. 24, pp. 339-346) and the general "concluding remarks" (L. N. 25, pp. 146-147) leave no room for doubt on this point. Ehrenberg indeed doubted to the last whether any observer had seen living Radiolaria at all (L. N. 25, p. 108).