DUNEDIN WATER.

Evening Star, Issue 3489, 29 April 1874, Page 3

DUNEDIN WATER.

To the Editor. Sra,—At the meeting held last night Mr 'billies ask.d me what was the natural order of one of the animals figured in the micro, acopxo view of the Dunedin water drawn by Mr George and exhibited to the meeting. 1 W* S? at JJ e .? nimal was a cyclops and that X thought it was a crustacean. f?ot being a professional zoologist, and twentytwo years having elapsed since X attended lectures on zoology, I did not feel quite certain on the matter. Of course the question was not of the slightest consequence, as the purity or impurity does not depend on microscopic evidence at all-still less on a knowledge of the natural order to which an animal belongs. Suppose X had found a dead rat in the water, would it have mattered whether I knew to what order of mammalia the rat belongs . Mr Gillies, however, who seems better acquainted with zoology than with tl© language usual among gentlemen, flatly contradicted me, and said X was talking ©n a subject which X knew nothing about. Now, although 1 cannot pretend to compete with the chairman of the Dunedin Waterworks Company in an intimate acquaintance with all the nasty little things at , m u^ bl r W*. watep > y et as lam not in the habit of talking in public on “ subjects I know nothing about,”! looked up my Carpenter on the Microscope,” and there (p- 587, 2nd ed.) I hud the cyclops fully described and figured as a crustacean 1 Mr Gillies is perfectly right in describing these animals as the “ scavengers of the water. Ihey feed on dirt and garbage, and their abundance in Dunedin water (in which they swarm) show that they have plenty of their peculiar food. “Scavengers” is an admirable term. I thank Mr Gillies for the word —I am, &c.

t\ Dakewell, M.D, Dunedin, April 29.