IV 



Perhaps it will be well here to anticipate my 

 conclusion somewhat, by saying at once that as it 

 later turned out, I was considerably wide of the 

 mark, yet, in a way of speaking, I was not unreas- 

 onably wrong in forming the foregoing deductions. 

 Now, nine times out of ten, deductions such as 

 these, in the case of most observers and with similar 

 data, would be not only inevitable, but also safe. 

 Well, in regard to the inferences eventually drawn 

 — from the death both of my former individual 

 and the ones just mentioned — it seems that I was 

 right as well as safe. Without further preamble 

 let me say that I had fixed on low salinity as being 

 the inherent cause of those disastrous occurrences. 

 The containers in which I had kept these creatures 

 were filled with sea-water taken near the shore; 

 and this water, while not brackish enough to affect 

 other types of animals which I had been wont to 

 keep, was, I suspected, in salt and other chemical 

 constituents, insufficiently concentrated for so ob- 

 viously delicate an organism successfully to adjust 

 itself. That healthy serpent-stars occasionally are 

 found near the shore — such as was my single spec- 



[64] 



