minute quantities of material, on their way from a state of solution to a state of ãsuspension,ã pass through a liquid to a solid form; and their temporary sojourn in the former leaves its impress in the rounded contours which surface-tension brought about while the little aggregate was still labile or fluid: while coincidently with this surface-tension effect upon the surface, cryôÙstalôÙliôÙsaôÙtion tended to take place throughout the little liquid mass, or in such portion of it as had not yet consolidated and crystallised.
Where we have simple aggregates of two or three calôÙcoôÙspheôÙrites, the resulting figure is precisely that of so many contiguous soap-bubbles. In other cases, composite forms result which are not so easily explained, but which, if we could only account for them, would be of very great interest to the biologist. For instance, when smaller calcospheres seem, as it were, to invade the substance of a larger one, we get curious conformations which in the closest possible way resemble the outlines of certain of the Diatoms (Fig. 203). Another very curious formation, which Harting calls a ãconostat,ã is of frequent occurrence, and in it we see at least a suggestion of analogy with the configuration which, in a protoplasmic structure, we