INDUSTRIAL PROGRESS DURING THE YEAR 1873. xcv 



Survey. Some fishermen cut off the arm of a squid, and 

 afterward found the animal dead on the shore. The total 

 length of the body is seven feet, and its circumference five. 

 Around the head are eight large arms, each six or seven feet 

 in length, the largest nine inches in circumference. Besides 

 these were two longer tentacles, each twenty -four feet in 

 length. Mr. Murray, in a letter to the late Professor Agassiz, 

 published in the America?i Naturalist^ states that individuals 

 measured by fishermen on the coast of Labrador measured in 

 one case eighty, and in another ninety feet in length. 



Great activity has been manifested by naturalists in fur- 

 thering our knowledge of the structure and relationship of 

 the worms, among which are now included by some natural- 

 ists the Folyzoa as w^ell as Brachiopoda. Among the former, 

 a most remarkable form has been described by Professor M. 

 Sars under the name o? Uhahdopleiira mirahilis. Though the 

 genus was first described by the English naturalist Allman, 

 Sars and his son have, from a study of the living animal, im- 

 proved greatly Allman's first description. It is a small creep- 

 ing "moss-animal," which at intervals sends up tubes in winch 

 the individuals live. These individuals differ in nearly all 

 their essential points from the ordinary Polyzoa, so much so 

 that they can with difficulty be referred to the class of Poly- 

 zoa. First, he says, they have no "endocyst," or mantle, 

 w^hich all other Polyzoa have. Having no mantle, wdth no 

 muscles for the retraction of the animal within its tube, it is 

 in this w^ay allied to the Hydroid polyp. Retraction is effect- 

 ed by a contractile cord, at the end of which the animal is 

 suspended. It is thus, he concludes, intermediate between 

 the Hydrozoa and Polyzoa, or forms a transition from one to 

 the other. The RhahdopUura is, he continues, as quoted by 

 his son, G. O. Sars, undoubtedly, like many other animals 

 which at present inhabit the greater depths of the sea, "a 

 very old form,, which in its organization has still retained 

 several features from the time w^hen the animal type that w^e 

 call Polyzoa first developed itself from a low^er type." Thus, 

 he says, and it seems that Sars w^as an evolutionist, unlike 

 many of his fellow Scandinavian zoologists, the questions re- 

 garding the position of this animal can only be " properly 

 answered through the medium of the Darwinian theory." 

 In his view, the Polyzoa in the earliest primordial times (for 



