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.) (7) 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.