58 



gium« obviously refers to the two ossicles that are thus united. The 

 question of how syzygies are to be reckoned depends — so far as the 

 literary history of the term has any weight — on the exact meaning 

 of the word. Does it mean the pair of ossicles, or the suture between 

 them? It can hardly, one would think, mean both, any more than 

 the same word can mean bricks at one moment and mortar at another. 

 And yet at the outset, as we have seen, the use of the term is very 

 loose. The apparent distinction between «Syzygie« and »Syzygium« is 

 purely accidental, for in Müll er' s later paper «Über die Gattung 

 Comatulm (Phys. Abh. Akad.d. Wiss. Berlin 1847, p. 237—265: 1849) 

 we read on p. 248: »Das erste Armglied scheint ein Syzygium zu haben 



das folgende Glied ist wieder ein Syzygium.« Here is a curious 



mixture of the thing possessing and the thing possessed. How can a 

 brachial both have a syzygy and be a syzygy? The first »Syzygium« 

 must mean »syzygial suture«, and the second »Syzygium« must mean 

 »syzygial pair«. One finds precisely the same confusion in P. H. Car- 

 penter' s writings: thus, on p. 53 of the Challenger Report on the 

 Stalked Crinoids I read: »the alternation of syzygies and muscular 

 joints«; and »the two outer radiais, even when they are united by 

 syzygy« ; and »the supposed syzygies are really articulations of a pe- 

 culiar type«; in all of which sentences «syzygy« undoubtedly means, 

 as defined by Carpenter himself, an immoveable suturai union between 

 two ossicles. But on p. 51 of the same work, »syzygy« is used for what 

 is elsewhere called »a syzygial pair«, as thus: »the axillary is a syzygy«; 

 »the second radial of Metacrinus angulatus is a syzygy«. Even Jeffrey 

 Bell, whose sense of style usually saves him from such absurdities, 

 appears to me, in his »Catalogue of the British Echinoderms in the 

 British Museum«, to explain the word »syzygy« as meaning a form of 

 suture (p. 9), whereas in his descriptions he invariably uses it to denote 

 a syzygial pair. This protest is no hypercritical pedantry: it really 

 is often very difficult to follow descriptions in which these and other 

 terms are so loosely used. A student for example is told that a syzygy 

 is »an immoveable suturai i;nion« , as contrasted with a »muscular 

 joint«; and then he is told that »the third, eighth, and twelfth joints of 

 the arm of Antedon rosacea are syzygies«. How can he understand 

 this to mean that there are syzygies between the third and fourth, 

 ninth and tenth, and fourteenth and fifteenth ossicles respectively? 



2) The employment of the term Syzygy. — In describing the 

 distribution of syzygies in an arm, it is the custom to reckon each 

 syzygial pair as one ossicle. Now if »syzygy« means a pair of ossicles 

 immovably united, it is consistent with the meaning to reckon the 

 syzygies in that manner. But if »syzygy« means an immoveable suturai 



