130 Bibliographical Notices. 



fragments of the Crinoidea; fragments which were once built up in animated! 

 forms, encased in living flesh, and obeying the will of creatures among the 

 loveliest of the inhabitants of the ocean. Even in their present disjointed 

 and petrified state, they excite the admiration not only of the naturalist but 

 of the common gazer ; and the name of Stone-lily popularly applied to them, 

 indicates a popular appreciation of their beauty. To the philosopher they 

 have long been subjects of contemplation as well as of admiration. In him they 

 raise up a vision of an early world, a world the potentates of which were not 

 men but animals — of seas on whose tranquil surfaces myriads of convoluted 

 Nautili sported, and in whose depths millions of Lily-stars waved wilfully 

 on their ^lender stems. Now the Lily-stars and the Nautili are almost gone : 

 a few lovely stragglers of those once-abounding tribes remain to evidence 

 the wondrous forms and structures of their comrades. Other beings, not less 

 wonderful, and scarcely less graceful, have replaced them ; white the seas 

 in which they flourished have become lands, whereon man in his columned 

 cathedrals and mazy palaces emulates the beauty and symmetry of their 

 fluted stems and chambered shells." 



The species figured is the Comatula rosacea, or Rosy Feather-Star, 

 ** a creature which in its youth is fixed and pedunculate, like a zoo- 

 phyte, in its adult state free and star-like." This view was first main- 

 tained hy Mr. J. V. Thompson of Cork, who regarded the Pentacri- 

 nus Europceus as the young state of the Comatula, an opinion which 

 has now been fully confirmed. 



" When dredging," says Mr. Forbes, " in Dublin Bay in August 1840, with 

 my friends Mr. R. Ball and W. Thompson, we found numbers of the Phy- 

 tocrinus or Polype state of the Feather-star, more advanced than they had 

 ever been seen before, so advanced that we saw the creature drop from its 

 stem and swim about a true Comatula; nor could we find any difference be- 

 tween it and the perfect animal, when examining it under the microscope." 



The Starfishes composing the second order are the OpmuRiDiE, 

 " so named from the long serpent or worm-like arms, which are ap- 

 pended to their round, depressed, urchin-like bodies ;" they are di- 

 vided into three genera and thirteen species ; of these, two (0. punc- 

 tata and 0. Goodsirii) are for the first time described and figured. 

 The 0. Ballii, described a short time before in the ' Annals,' is now 

 for the first time figured. A figure and description of 0. filiformis, 

 as a British species, appears for the first time, as does also a figure of 

 the O. brachiata of Montagu. In speaking of the O . filiformis , the 

 author describes a remarkable peculiarity in the structure of its 

 spines, exhibiting " a very beautiful example of the adaptation of or- 

 ganization to the locality in which the creature is destined to live." 

 And in the 0. bellis, " one of the prettiest of its tribe," it is re- 

 marked, — 



" This intermingled surface of spines and plates gives the disk that like- 

 ness to a daisy -flower, whence it has been called ' bellis' by some ; nor is 

 the flower at all degraded by the comparison, for but few daisies can show 

 such beauty either of form or colour as is presented by this little Sea-star." 



Persons who have not given attention to these objects, or who 

 know them only in the dried and rigid aspect which they present in 

 our museums, have no idea of the variety and beauty which they 

 exhibit in the living state. Those who have ever been present when 

 a dredge half-filled with the commonest of our Brittle-stars, 0. rosula, 



