268 MR. GOSSE ON PEACHIA HASTATA. 
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 eircumference, 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 papille 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 
cesophagus, 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 Actinie.” | 
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 4th 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 z4,th 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 th of an inch, or eighteen 
times the length of the capsule. | 
an these ee EIER obe became defunct by a sort of spontaneous dissolution 
| 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 
