268 MR. GOSSE ON PEACHIA H.VSTATA. 



This curious apparatus appeared to form one side of the mouth, — to be, in fact, an 

 enlargement of the paries or lip, at one part of the circumference, with nothing corre- 

 sponding to it on the opposite side. It was perforate, and, as I conjecture, led down to 

 the visceral cavity of the body, external to the stomach, constituting the orifice through 

 which the ova or young are ordinarily deposited. In the smallest specimen I could not 

 detect more than four or five of the cored papillae on this prominence. Under a lens, 

 when the animal was sickening, and the Lips were much protruded and everted, the organ 

 was evidently seen to be a tube, with thickened walls, enclosed within one paries of the 

 oesophagus, and with its margin studded with papilla?. Into the orifice, which was 

 corrugated, I could thrust a bristle with ease. Fig. 5 represents the mouth in this 

 condition. 



The natural habits of this Zoophyte, as seen in freedom, are thus graphically described 

 by Mr. Kingsley in his letters to me. " They Lie (or rather stand) in wet, ribbed, clean 

 sand, at low-water mark, the disk just out of ground. On digging carefully (for the 

 animal retracts on the least shaking of the sand), you find that he is buried bolt-upright 

 to the depth of 9 inches, where his extremity stops ; the whole animal tapering gradually 

 from stem to stern. On being taken out (no easy matter, since its power of retraction, 

 if irritated, is far more rapid and springy than in any of the class, as far as I have tried 

 them), and put into a vase of salt water, he swells himself out with water like a Holo- 

 thurian, disclosing longitudinal septa. He also has a tendency to transverse constric- 

 tion, like Scolanthus and Chirodota ; but this has gone off in my specimens. All his 

 motions (at least before he has made a cold bath of his own skin by taking in water) are 

 rapid and spasmodic ; betokening, as does his whole make, a higher muscular organiza- 

 tion than that of the Actmice." 



None of the specimens made the slightest attempt to adhere; nor did the posterior 

 extremities show any appearance of a sucking disk. There was, however, a strong corru- 

 gation in that part, radiating from a central orifice, into which I thrust the point of a 

 pin without resistance to the depth of £th of an inch. 



All the three specimens which first came into my hands were more or less languid and 

 sickly when I received them. One of them was swollen into a balloon-like form, and 

 never expanded the tentacles at all. The others soon became invested with a thick 

 tenacious mucus, and though they retained the power of expanding and retracting the 

 tentacles, they burst the integument in one or more wounds, so that the convoluted bands 

 protruded. The latter organs were present in copious profusion, broad bands very much 

 frilled, with a slender " beading " or thickened border, which the microscope showed to 

 be moderately filled with minute slender thread-capsules, about g^o^h of an inch in 

 length, slightly curved ; they discharged the thread freely, but with unusual slowness, 

 the lengthening of the tip resembling the progress of the minute-hand of a watch. One 

 that I measured, of an average length, extended to about -^jjth of an inch, or eighteen 

 times the length of the capsule. 



All these individuals successively became defunct by a sort of spontaneous dissolution 

 of the parietes of the body. The integument seemed to change into a viscid mucus, and 

 presently burst in many places, allowing the convoluted bands to protrude so copiously 



