You will find it stick to your fingers by the whole skin, causing, if your hand be delicate, a tingling sensation; and if you examine the skin under the microscope, you will find the cause. The whole skin is studded with minute glass anchors, some hanging freely from the surface, but most imbedded in the skin. Each of these anchors is jointed at its root into one end of a curious cribriform plate, - in plain English, one pierced like a sieve, which lies under the skin, and reminds one of the similar plates in the skin of the White Cucumaria, which I will show you presently; and both of these we must regard as the first rudiments of an Echinoderm's outside skeleton, such as in the Sea-urchins covers the whole body of the animal. (See on Echinus Millaris, p. 89.) Somewhat similar anchor-plates, from a Red Sea species, Synapta Vittata, may be seen in any collection of microscopic objects.
The animal, when caught, has a strange habit of self-destruction, contracting its skin at two or three different points, and writhing till it snaps itself into "junks," as the sailors would say, and then dies. My specimens, on breaking up, threw out from the wounded part long "ovarian filaments" (whatsoever those may be), similar to those thrown out by many of the Sagartian anemones, especially S. parasitica. Beyond this, I can tell you nothing about Synapta, and only ask you to consider its hands, as an instance of that fantastic play of Nature which repeats, in families widely different, organs of similar form, though perhaps of by no means similar use; nay, sometimes (as in those beautiful clear-wing hawk-moths which you, as they hover round the rhododendrons, mistake for bumble-bees) repeats the outward form of a whole animal, for no conceivable reason save her - shall we not say honestly His? - own good pleasure.
But here we are at the old bank of boulders, the ruins of an antique pier which the monks of Tor Abbey built for their convenience, while Torquay was but a knot of fishing huts within a lonely limestone cove. To get to it, though, we have passed many a hidden treasure; for every ledge of these flat New-red-sandstone rocks, if torn up with the crowbar, discloses in its cracks and crannies nests of strange forms which shun the light of day;beautiful Actiniae fill the tiny caverns with living flowers; great Pholades (Plate X. figs. 3, 4) bore by hundreds in the softer strata; and wherever a thin layer of muddy sand intervenes between two slabs, long Annelid worms of quaintest forms and colours have their horizontal burrows, among those of that curious and rare radiate animal, the Spoonworm, an eyeless bag about an inch long, half bluish grey, half pink, with a strange scalloped and wrinkled proboscis of saffron colour, which serves, in some mysterious way, soft as it is, to collect food, and clear its dark passage through the rock.
See, at the extreme low-water mark, where the broad olive fronds of the Laminariae, like fan-palms, droop and wave gracefully in the retiring ripples, a great boulder which will serve our purpose.
Its upper side is a whole forest of sea-weeds, large and small; and that forest, if you examined it closely, as full of inhabitants as those of the Amazon or the Gambia. To "beat" that dense cover would be an endless task: but on the under side, where no sea-weeds grow, we shall find full in view enough to occupy us till the tide returns. For the slab, see, is such a one as sea-beasts love to haunt. Its weed-covered surface shows that the surge has not shifted it for years past. It lies on other boulders clear of sand and mud, so that there is no fear of dead sea-weed having lodged and decayed under it, destructive to animal life. We can see dark crannies and caves beneath; yet too narrow to allow the surge to wash in, and keep the surface clean. It will be a fine menagerie of Nereus, if we can but turn it.
Now the crowbar is well under it; heave, and with a will; and so, after five minutes' tugging, propping, slipping, and splashing, the boulder gradually tips over, and we rush greedily upon the spoil.
A muddy dripping surface it is, truly, full of cracks and hollows, uninviting enough at first sight: let us look it round leisurely, to see if there are not materials enough there for an hour's lecture.
