CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE ZOOLOGICAL LABORATORY OF THE MUSEUM OF 
COMPARATIVE ZOOLOGY AT HARVARD COLLEGE, E. L. MARK, Director, No. 199 
WOUND REPARATION AND POLARITY IN TENTA- 
CLES OF ACTINIANS? 
BY 
HERBERT W. RAND 
All animals, so far as experiments have gone, show capacity 
for prompt repair of damages. When an animal suffers an injury 
which is not necessarily fatal and which does not too seriously inter- 
fere with the normal life-processes, activities begin immediately 
in some or all of the tissues which share in the wound surface 
and these activities result quickly in a protective adjustment of 
some sort. If the wound is more than skin deep these activities 
appear to be primarily directed toward the restoration of a normal 
outside surface—normal, not necessarily as regards the form of 
it, but in the sense that the deep tissues which have been exposed 
by the wound are covered over by a tissue which is normally a 
superficial one. Subsequent to this immediate repair of the sur- 
face there may ensue more or less complete eres: of the 
lost deeper parts, with restoration of the original form. case 
like this we may distinguish two phases 1 in the total process a rep- 
aration. (I use the word “reparation” in the every-day sense of 
making good an injury—by any means whatever, not in the re- 
stricted sense in which Driesch has proposed to use the word.) 
First there is a quick protective covering of deep tissues by a 
superficial tissue, then follows the slower regeneration of lost 
parts. It is with the first phase of the reparation—the process 
commonly spoken of as the closing of the wound—that I wish 
to deal in this paper. In a former paper (Rand ’o4)1 have given 
some historical account of observations upon this matter. 
The method by which a wound becomes closed depends more 
or less upon the degree of complexity of the organism and in some 
measure upon the size of the organism and the extent of the wound. 
1 Contributions from the Bermuda Biological Station for Research. No 16. 
Tue JourNnaL or ExPERIMENTAL ZOOLOGY, VOL. VII, NO, I 
