4 THE AMERICAN ARBACIA 



Nor lead me, like a firebrand, in the dark 

 Out of my way, unless he bid 'em." 



The Tempest II, ii, 4. 



"Like urchins, ouphes and fairies, green and white". 

 The Merry Wives of Windsor IV, iv, 50. 



The country boys around Cambridge always call a hedgehog an 

 urchin (D'Arcy Thompson, personal communication, February 1948). 



The French, oursin\ for sea urchin, has the same derivation (from 

 the Latin ericius) as the English urchin, and is said to be a corruption 

 oiherisson (hedgehog). It probably does not mean a little bear, as some- 

 times stated. The Italian name for sea urchin, riccio di mare or riccio 

 marino, is from the same Latin root ericius, and means literally a hedge- 

 hog of the sea. The Spanish word is similar, erizo de mar. The German 

 word for sea urchin, Seeigel, also means hedgehog {Igel) ; the older 

 German word was Meerigel. The modern Greek word for sea urchin 

 is achinos, similar to the ancient Greek. 



In the earlier British literature, sea urchins were often referred to 

 as sea hedgehogs, as for instance by Sir Thomas Browne (1658) in his 

 Garden of Cyrus, where he philosophizes on the arrangement of the 

 plates and organs in the sea hedgehog in series of five: "By the same 

 number doth nature divide the circle of the sea star, and in that order 

 and number disposeth these elegant semicircles, or dental sockets and 

 eggs in the sea hedgehog." Sir John Hill (1752) also refers to the sea 

 hedgehog. Sea urchins are still called sea hedgehogs in certain parts 

 of England and Scotland. In A History of British Starfishes by the cele- 

 brated British naturalist, Edward Forbes (1841, p. 141) there is a most 

 interesting woodcut, showing two boys at the seashore with a sea 

 urchin and a hedgehog, apparently greatly amused at their resem- 

 blance (Fig. i). Forbes calls them egg-urchins and sea-eggs, and they 

 are still called sea-eggs in some regions of England and Scotland ; in 

 Jamaica, they are usually called sea-eggs. The term sea-egg probably 

 does not refer to the eggs or to their use as food, but is rather based 

 on the appearance and texture of the bleached, bare test as found on 

 the beaches (H. L. Clark, 1933, p. 82). Sir Hans Sloane (1725) de- 

 scribes the fossil shells in the chalk pits of Kent as becoming filled with 

 a fine chalk and used as a medicine for digestive troubles, whence they 

 are called chalk eggs. The fossil spines of a large species are known as 

 Jewstones, or Judeo de mer (see Oxford Dictionary). In an interesting 



' The French ours (bear) comes from the Latin ursus and this from a different root, ipxToi;. 



