II. Aggregate eyes.

These are found solely in the family of the Phacopidæ, unless the Lichadidæ were also provided with this sort of eyes, but we have had no opportunity to study them. It seems, however, not likely that they had aggregate eyes. Barrande has represented them quite as finely reticulate as the eves of any Asaphid. We have sectioned and figured the eyes of Dalmanites vulgaris and D. obtusus from the Silurian of Gotland and found that these have truly aggregate eyes, each consisting of a regular biconvex lens, lying enclosed in a socket of its own and covered by a cornea of its own. The distance between the eyes is much variable and in a few instances they are nearly contiguous. Extremes are seen on pl. III figures 43, 47. The lenses are comparatively large, and have always had a covering membrane, though this in many instances has been lost. This membrane which is an immediate continuation of the general integument of the body covers the lenses all round their superior moiety. In its prolongation downwards between the lenses (Pl. VI fig. 3, 4) it is free from the contact with them and hangs alongside and around much incrassated, so as to take in a section a lengthened lancet like shape. It lies thus alongside the other interstitial test, and is like this perforated by longitudinal canals. In a horizontal section taken a little below the surface it encircles the lens as a wall like ring (Pl. VI fig. 1, 2). In a vertical section the lenses lie in direct contact with the cheek without any intervening zone and the cheek has the structure so common amongst the trilobites, being perforated by vertical tubes going straight down from the surface (Pl. III fig. 44, Pl. VI f. 5).

In Dalm. vulgaris and also in Phacops quadrilineata there is as already before mentioned a peculiar structure beneath the lenses, consisting of narrow, threadlike, straight lines, twice as long as the lenses (Pl. III 49-50, pl. V fig. 38). In a horizontal section they are found to be irregular prisms closely packed. It can not be any structure peculiar to the eyes or the lenses, rather some parasitic growth added since the death of the animal. The lenses are in several specimens composed of clear calcareous spar. In others again they have been filled with a dark muddy calcareous rock excepting in the lower moiety where there is left a residue of the white spar, having in all lenses assumed a regular shape which I consider as organic (Pl. VI fig. 5). This spar covers the whole bottom and its upper rim is incrassated and bent inwards. In horizontal sections this residue is a whitish ring close inside the interior ring wall (Pl. VI f. 2). I would suggest that this curious conformation is due to the original structure of the lens, supposing that it in these crustaceans has been built upon the same plan as in several other Arthropoda. In Cymothoa[30] and in Sphæroma[31] for instance the lenses are built up of thin strata, which are parallel with the convex outside, so that on the inferior surface of the lens they are arched downwards and on the superior side upwards, being not strictly concentric. In the spiders they are constructed upon this same plan[32] perhaps more evidently. If now in Phacops the lens consisted of such semiconcentric strata and the upper moiety has been destroyed, the rest must have taken the shape as we find it. It is moreover peculiar that the destruction has been exactly similar in all lenses of that specimen. Can it be due to the circumstance that the power of resistance in the inferior strata has been greater?

In Phacops quadrilineata the lenses are more elliptic than in the former. On their interior surface beneath the spiny tufts mentioned large hexaedral prisms of clear calcareous spar issue, one prism for each lens (Pl. V fig. 38), having thus a very deceptive appearance, but no doubt of inorganic origin with the lenses as a basis for their crystallization, quite as in the Cystoids where the interior often is converted into a mass of crystalline prisms, issuing from the interior surface of the plates.