182 THE AQUARIAN NATURALIST. 



ing Pentacrinus by no means terminates here ; it has 

 yet another history, which we must proceed to deve- 

 lope, and which, embracing, as it does, one of the 

 most remarkable discoveries in modern Zoology, claims 

 our notice. 



If we were told by any traveller, that he had visited 

 an unknown region where the animals dropped their 

 eggs on trees and shrubs, and that the eggs there 

 fixed themselves, and shot up, like parasitic plants, 

 with a long stem, gradually evolving at their extreme 

 end limb after limb and function after function, until 

 the young animals thus formed became so perfect as 

 to resemble their parents in every essential point, and 

 that then their attachment with the connecting foot- 

 stalk was dissolved, that they became locomotive, and 

 betook themselves to the free and wandering life of 

 the parent stock, few could be got to believe facts so 

 incredible, and so much at variance with the usual 

 course of nature. 



It is no uncommon thing, in the inferior classes of 

 the animal kingdom, to find animals permanently at- 

 tached from the period of their birth and during the 

 whole of their existence. Familiar examples of this 

 occur in the Oyster and various other bivalve shell- 

 fish, as well as in numerous compound Zoophytes. 

 We shall in the following pages likewise meet with 

 races which are free and locomotive in their first 

 stages, and afterwards become permanently fixed ; 

 but an animal growing for a period in the similitude 

 of a flower on its stem, and then dropping from its 

 pedicel, and becoming during the remainder of its 



