142 NOTES.
sional eye, as if he half expected to find some tiny shell-fish ensconced
in the bright strands of wool. Unfortunately, the little fellow became
more and more lame, though no effort to procure relief for him was
spared. I was disposed to ascribe the progress of the malady to the
absence of salt water. At length he succumbed, having lived
upwards of three weeks at my side. Had I been living on the coast
at the time, I should have procured some Dunlins to bear him com-
pany ; for the Curlew Sandpiper is a sociable bird, and usually
associates with "Oxbirds," when accidentally separated from
individuals of its own species. I wish that it had been possible to
learn more of the habits of the species than could be gleaned from
the unobtrusive ways of my specimen ; but as I have never come
across any published account of the ways of a captive Curlew Sand-
piper, these lines may perhaps be of interest to some fellow-students
of the Limicolae.
Dichromatism in Euglena.—Some interesting Infusoria of the family
Astasiadae (Saville Kent) have been observable at Donyland Heath, near
Colchester, this summer. While very much resembling Euglena, the absence of
a red eye-spot places them more properly perhaps in the genus Astasia, if
indeed these two supposed genera are not merely different stages of one genus.
During July and August the forms almost completely covered the surface of the
largest pond on the heath, though not a trace of them appeared on any of the
adjacent ponds. They formed a film or pellicle which was red in the morning
but turned to brilliant green in the afternoon. I watched the change take place
just at noon on the August Bank Holiday and the complete transformation from
red to green took about half an hour. During this half hour, however, the sun
was hidden by a cloud, and I found that when it once more shone upon the water
the red colour returned. Enclosing some of each colour in glass tubes, I placed
the green ones in the sunlight and the red in the shade. The former soon
reddened but the latter remained red. Dr. D. D. Cunningham (" Science
Gossip," 1886, p. 163), mentions exactly similar phenomena in tanks around Cal-
cutta, speaking of the forms as Euglena, and attributing the colour change partly to
certain aerial habits of the infusoria. Under the microscope I found them to be
some red, some green ; many of them spherical and motionless, but some
fusiform and amoeboid and in more or less rapid motion. They were all
granular in appearance and a very few only seemed to have flagella. There
was no eye-speck on any of them, though a few of the red ones were slightly
tinged with green at the extremities. Full sunshine did not actually change the
colouring, which I therefore imagine is due rather to the relative positions of the
mingled red and green forms under the influence of light. As recently as
1888, Garcin insists that these forms (or rather the Euglena) are properly algae.
After the heavy rains in August 1 found the pond quite clear of them.—Charles
E. Benham, Colchester, September, 1890.