establish the soundness of the conclusions I had 

 drawn therefrom. That is to say, either the in- 

 ductive or the deductive method could be em- 

 ployed. I decided on the deductive. 



Thus far, of course, my known facts were 

 meager and were based entirely on the examina- 

 tion of a dead animal, but their elaboration en- 

 tailed practically the complete knowledge of the 

 creature's life and habits. It may be well, there- 

 fore, briefly to review in numerical order some of 

 those facts and the deductions I made in each in- 

 stance before taking up the evidence of the tanks 

 themselves. But lest it here appear that this is 

 written with an air of what-a-smart-fellow-I-am, 

 I wish to anticipate the reader and ask that he form 

 no opinion until the agreement of my deductions 

 with later findings is revealed. 



Fact Number One concerns its skeleton. Here I 

 must recall that the disk of the serpent-star is com- 

 posed of a number of fused plates, the whole, with 

 the exception of the five triangular processes form- 

 ing the jaws, being a rigid naked framework; 

 while the arms consist of numerous ball and socket 

 joints, like the backbone of a vertebrate, and are, 

 aside from two minute passages running through- 



[60] 



